Really for getting started you just need memory. Everything else is just a convenience in terms of performance and won't really buy you more functionality.
I run XP as my host OS with just 2GB of physical RAM, and then do development in a 768MB Linux partition under that using VMWare Workstation. You can do the same thing for free with Xen or VMWare Player or Server.
When 2-4GB is not enough, then either upgrade your workstation to a 64-bit OS and throw in as much memory as you can fit/afford, or bring up another box.
You can get VMWare ESXi for free and do bare metal virtualization if you want to, or run the 64-bit Linux distro of your choice and instances of VMWare Server on top of that, again all for free.
Memory is the most important resource, then having more than one CPU core is nice, but for "home experimenting" you don't really need anything fancy.
If you have money, wait a couple weeks until the Nehalem server chips come out and get a dual-CPU server with 16+GB or ram. That will give you 8 screaming fast cores, ECC memory, and the ability to run as many virtual machines as you could possibly want.
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Surprise! You actually aren't god's gift to business after all.
As far as Bill Gates goes though, if you look at his early history he was indeed in the right place at the right time, but he darn well clawed his way to the top through skill as much as luck I think, and I have a lot of respect for that.
At a very early computer conference, all the other people got up and allowed as how there was going to be plenty of room in this new industry for all the different manufacturers. Only Bill got up and said "you guys are all wrong, there's going to be one winner and the rest will lose".
Say what you want about Bill's business methodologies, but I think he's actually about the poorest example of the "outlier" effect that you can find.
Service, whether it's software, hardware, helpdesk, whatever, is very hard to generalize.
Everyone wants to do things their own way and everyone has some weird little set of extra requirements. So every package that's available has already choked to death and drowned in features that most people will not need.
You get web UIs with tabs containing tabs containing hundreds of fields, of which a typical customer will probably use about 2-5%, and they'll end up stuffing information into them that they weren't originally intended to contain.
I really can't think of an application domain that cries out for a completely custom solution in almost every case.
Consider something like POV-Ray, since it's a programming environment with a visual payoff.
Show someone a simple program that generates 10 randomly positioned mirrored sphere over a checkered landscape then encourage them to play with the number of sphere, assign colors to them, etc.
Much more interesting to be able to *see* the output of your program than just reading "Hello World!".
Open Source development is an absolutely amazing and powerful tool......for everyone in the world whose livelihood comes from something *other* than selling software.
Bankers need to run their banks more efficiently so they get together to cooperatively develop some banking application software that makes them all work more effectively and efficiently. This is the magic of co-op software development. There are other people who have the same problems you do, and if you get together you can produce really useful software for vanishingly small cost, and the result can be replicated without limit or expense.
Bankers don't, on the other hand, create free, zero-income banks.
Commerceial software companies making free software is, and always has been, a really dumb idea.
If you find yourself in this position, my suggestion is to move up the food chain towards applications of the software you've developed. Eventually you'll find a level where people have problems they're willing to pay to have solved because they're not common enough to make an open source / co-op solution viable.
If your business plan reads:
1) Invent really cool new product. 2) Give it away for free. 3) Enable the community to do all their own support and enhancements. 4) ???? 5) Profit!
let me save you some time and point out that there is nothing you can put in step 4 that leads to step 5.
Open source development is not a segment of the software indusrty, it's a segment of the every-other-industry.
Yes, if you're in the business of software to do X, then making a free version of software to do X is stupid because if you're successful then eventually you will be out of business, sorry.
The magic of open source / cooperative development is that you have multiple people who share a common problem who gain great leverage by working together to produce something that all can use to solve that problem.
So farmers get together and write farming software, bankers get together and write banking software, etc., and this makes huge sense because the end result only enhances their businesses.
But software makers making free software is, and always has been, a fundamentally stupid business model, at least for those whose business plan does not clearly explain how they avoid this obvious trap, or who plan to "make it up in volume".
You need to be making your money off of something *other* than the free software you produce. Business plans based on selling support, customization, proprietary extensions, and the like are indeed ultimately doomed to failure as there's nothing stopping other people who NEED those things from doing it themselves better, faster, and cheaper than you can.
Open Source / Free software is a wonderful thing for society, it's just not so hot for the software "industry".
If you find yourself in this position, then my recommendation is to move out of the free-software "business" and move up into applications of that software, since that's where there will still be problems people are willing to pay to solve.
To the best of my knowledge, the $2400 professional version of the software has no copy protection whatsoever. At least mine never has that I'm aware of.
Now, the license only allows you to install it on a single system and you have to pay several hundred dollars per year for Premium Service (which I do) in order to get a "home use" license that lets you run it on a second system legally. Also the home-use license is node-locked and expires when your service term is up (if you don't renew).
It's generally only users of the ~$100 student version (which is node-locked to a single system) who are likely to be whining about copy protection.
Do you think Microsoft re-writes the OS from scratch every time? No, they just incrementally change the previous version, and this happens slowly over the course of development. Since 7 is still a year or so away at this point they're just showing you mostly user interface changes with little or no changes to the core underlying os. By the time it releases there will probably be some significant changes, but right now I suspect you're mostly looking at a UI demo running on top of plain old Vista.
I keep seeing posts like "I tried out Windows 7 and it looks like all my software is 100% compatible and runs great!". Well duh, since it's the same OS you're running now.
Wait six months or so before passing judgement on this thing.
My understanding is that the usual arrangement (such as for government employees) is that you agree as a term of employment to sell all patent rights to your employer.
The traditional price for this is one dollar per patent.
This is typically awarded at an annual event/dinner thing recognizing those people who were granted patents that year.
The recipients typically save the dollar bills so awarded and are quite proud of them.
I get the feeling that an employment agreement that says all patents will be signed over to the employer without payment are probably invalid as some money has to change hands (the $1) to make the transfer contractually binding. So any company thinking that their typical "we own every thought you have while you work for us" employment agreement / employee handbook may be in for a rude surprise if they're not compensating inventors for their patents.
Spore has two problems. First of all it has rather annoying DRM that probably actually has negative effects on about 1% of its players. But more importantly it's just not that great of a game. It's style of play and features will probably appeal strongly to about 10% of players.
So the game is not going to do anywhere near as well as they hoped. But the gameplay problems are probably at *least* 10x more the cause of this than the DRM issues.
But who are the developers going to blame? Which do you think is more likely:
A) Developers admit "The game wasn't that good really. Next time we'll try harder. Sorry about the $50M we spent over four years."
B) Developers blame DRM protests saying "This game is a failure only because of the DRM related issues. We are saddened by the fact that so many people were pushed into bootlegging the game which prevented its being a commercial success."
Anyone else think "B" is slightly more likely?
The net result is that everyone blames the DRM stuff so that they don't have to take any personal blame for the failure. And so the anti-DRM crowd gain a huge win that will dramatically reduce DRM use in the future, even though DRM probably had little to do with the relative success of the game.
G.
P.S. After wandering through a computer store and seeing hundreds of copies of the game in both regular and collector's edition versions this weekend, I have a new tag-line for it:
i disagree. i think there are a lot more competent programmers out there than there are visionary individuals. programming is a technical skill, but with most non-menial trades, it takes more than just technical prowess to succeed. you also need to be inspired or possess a little more creativity than the next guy.
Yes absolutely, and this is where the true genius lies. But it's skill in implementation, not skill in coming up with the original idea. The ones who succeed are the ones who can apply that visionary skill to every step of the design and implementation. These are people to whom you can give even a stupid idea and they'll turn it into something of significant value.
The gods of open source software development are people who had an idea that they thought was good (whether or not it actually was is somewhat irrelevant, the most important thing is that the TIME was right for it), AND they had the skill to implement it in a way that didn't suck.
Unfortunately there's also a lot of luck involved. Ideas can be bad, or worse they can be good ideas at the wrong time, or a bad idea will win out over better ideas due to market forces that outweigh the natural goodness of the alternatives.
Also related to this is that having been successful once is no guarantee you'll be able to do it again. Many fortunes have been gained and then lost again because the person thought "oh, look at my success, I must be an effing genius" when in reality a big part of their earlier success was just being in the right place at the right time.
Worth reading for people who think their ideas are valuable and especially those who want help implementing them but are afraid to tell anyone about them for fear they'll be stolen.
If you want to work in a field where ideas have significant value then go into marketing or advertising, or become a short story writer.
In the software world:
1) Ideas have vanishingly small value. Only implementations of ideas are worth anything. 2) Everyone has more ideas than they could ever implement. 3) Chances are good that others already had your special idea many times before. Never ever get hung up on the idea that someone might, or has, stolen your idea. In general ideas themselves are not protectable or are not worth worrying about. 4) People do not steal unproven ideas, they steal proven ones. So tell everyone your secret idea because it might help you and won't hurt, and if you are successful then they're all going to steal your idea at that point anyway. 5) Nobody wants to write your software for you. If we're going to work on something then we're going to use our own ideas. If you like your idea then go implement it because NOBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD IS GOING TO DO IT FOR YOU. 6) So get started. Making a beginning is half the battle. Don't just think and plan. Write some code. Produce some permanent artifact from your work every day. 7) Successful open-source projects start out as COMPLETE WORKING SYSTEMS written by the person or people who had the original "itch". Once there's something there that you can use then other people will start using it and then they'll want to make changes and enhancements. So don't expect any volunteer help until the project is already mostly "done" from your own point of view. 8) If you release a product using your idea, and someone else copies the idea and gets rich when you don't, then it's because they did a better job than you did and you need to get over it. If you sit around thinking that billion dollars should have been yours and they screwed you and you deserve more then it will totally destroy your life. The competition is not about who has the best cool sexy idea, it's about who can make the idea into something real and successful.
All ideas should be like supermarket coupons. They should have a little note at the bottom that says "cash value 1/100 of one cent".
Yeah, I too looked at this when it came out and didn't get it initially. The first thought most of us have is that it's there to prey on stupid people or clumsy clickers. And it's annoying to have to worry about $1,000 apps in and among the $3 ones.
But on reflection I think this is absolutely as viable and acceptable as any other crazy luxury good that people buy to show off. Watches that cost thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of dollars, jewel encrusted cell phones, and $5,000 designer items that are more poorly made than the $29 Wal-Mart version.
It's a stroke of genius on the part of the developer (in being the first to think of this and having the balls to do it), and now the publicity has turned it into a legitimate thing that now has the recognition that such a luxury item requires. Who will buy a $250,000 watch if nobody else knows it was expensive?
He can probably sell 100 or more of these things if Apple puts it back up on the store, and I say more power to him.
It would be nice if Apple would add an iTunes account setting for maximum allowable item price so I can set mine up to not be able to accidentally by anything that costs more than $20.
Of course within days I'm sure we'll see a whole slew of applications on the app store named "I'm Poor" that are free and parody the "I'm Rich" app in one way or another. Like one that replicates the look of the original exactly but re-renders the gem picture using the index of refraction of cubic zerconia.
The average weight of cremated remains for an adult male is six pounds according to Wikipedia, but weight is so limited in these rocket launches that they're only sending an ounce or two of the remains each time.
Remember the light pen? The touch screen? The head position tracking pointer? All gone from general use.
The problem is that most of these alternative input devices require either more physical effort than moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, or they require learning fine motor control over muscles that aren't normally used for that sort of thing and so the learning process will give the user so much pain that they'll give it up before it ever gets a chance.
Light pens and touch screens require lifting your arm up into the air which is much more effort than using the mouse.
The mouse is nearly the perfect input device and is likely to remain the #1 general purpose input device for a LONG time to come. Painless, intuitive, low-effort.
Exotic and specialized input devices will always have a place, but generally only in specialized and exotic situations.
China is clearly the big up and coming economy, and being able to interact with them in their own language is going to be a huge advantage. Yeah, the ones you meet all learned to speak English, but whoever knows the other's language has the advantage. If you want to win, you gotta speak the lingo.
If I were in school at this point, I would be learning everything I could about China.
The only problem with "one toolset" is picking the set of tools to be included. If people are suggesting tools that are new or had major changes in the last year or two then you're probably screwed because people are just heat-seeking to the latest trendy tool chain.
Any set of tools you pick is going to look pretty hairy in a couple years, and to be worthwhile a "one toolset" initiative really needs to be stuck-to for 5-10 years in a typical business environment. Anything less and you might as well just pick a new toolset for every project, since you're not going to get the benefit of standardization except over a long period of time.
So my recommendation when people suggest this is to require them to pick a set of tools that existed two years ago, and restrict versions to things upwards compatible to what existed then.
When forced to go through this exercise people tend to go "ewww, who wants to use that old stuff", but that's exactly where you're going to be in a couple years, and you need to be sure you're not using the "one toolset" initiative as a way to sneak in someone's idea of what this year's sexy hot new tools are.
The trick is sticking with your choices long enough to get the benefits, and not just abandoning them as soon as the downsides of your tool choices become apparent.
In general I think there's great benefit in making a "one toolset" decision, but only *if* you can actually stick with it through all the eventual pain and suffering. But I've never yet seen anyone (voluntarily) achieve that. If you try this then best of luck, and try to get buy-in from the people who own the company, not just the IT director of-the-week who might leave in 18 months and get replaced with someone with totally different ideas.
The whole thing was a plot by Tyriel to allow him to arrange the destruction of the world stone, the only thing standing in the way of his final conquest of heaven and earth.
Tyriel is clearly going to be the end boss of D3.
G.
Interesting press coverage of this.
on
Water Ice On Mars
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've noticed that almost all of the news headlines covering this are qualified statements like "Lander finds water on Mars, according to scientists". As if they're afraid to actually say something straightforward like "Water found on Mars" and they have to make it clear that they're just reporting what someone else is saying (with the implication that maybe they don't really believe it). At the same time they seem to have no problem with other headlines like "Celebrity Arrested Drunk" without the need to qualify it as "Celebrity Arrested Drunk According To Police" etc.
Maybe it's just me, but I mind it a bit irksome that so many big news outlets seem so detached from any sort of science reporting these days.
'the distribution of all of our users are: 50% only contributed 1 patch; 25% contributed 2; 12% contributed 3; 6% contributed 4 and so on...'"
Ah, but how many people wanted or attempted to contribute a patch but the process was either too complex or the powers that be just couldn't be convinced of the patch's value and so it didn't make it in?
I think that would be a very interesting statistic.
In a statement, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Amy Collella said the company closed the store after Hewlett-Packard Co., which provided the software running the site, ''made a business decision to discontinue its video download-only merchant store service.''
Walmart fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never buy any kind of application software from Hewlett-Packard! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
Seriously, HP has the worst cace of attention deficit disorder of any company I've ever seen. I've spent 25 years watching them announce "the next big thing" only to completely forget about it a year later after having sold it to three big customers (who are then completely screwed of course). Anyone who buys a proprietary solution from them at this point deserves what they get.
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Really for getting started you just need memory. Everything else is just a convenience in terms of performance and won't really buy you more functionality.
I run XP as my host OS with just 2GB of physical RAM, and then do development in a 768MB Linux partition under that using VMWare Workstation. You can do the same thing for free with Xen or VMWare Player or Server.
When 2-4GB is not enough, then either upgrade your workstation to a 64-bit OS and throw in as much memory as you can fit/afford, or bring up another box.
You can get VMWare ESXi for free and do bare metal virtualization if you want to, or run the 64-bit Linux distro of your choice and instances of VMWare Server on top of that, again all for free.
Memory is the most important resource, then having more than one CPU core is nice, but for "home experimenting" you don't really need anything fancy.
If you have money, wait a couple weeks until the Nehalem server chips come out and get a dual-CPU server with 16+GB or ram. That will give you 8 screaming fast cores, ECC memory, and the ability to run as many virtual machines as you could possibly want.
G.
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Surprise! You actually aren't god's gift to business after all.
As far as Bill Gates goes though, if you look at his early history he was indeed in the right place at the right time, but he darn well clawed his way to the top through skill as much as luck I think, and I have a lot of respect for that.
At a very early computer conference, all the other people got up and allowed as how there was going to be plenty of room in this new industry for all the different manufacturers. Only Bill got up and said "you guys are all wrong, there's going to be one winner and the rest will lose".
Say what you want about Bill's business methodologies, but I think he's actually about the poorest example of the "outlier" effect that you can find.
G.
Sigh, I mean "I really can't think of another application domain that so cries out for a completely custom solution in almost every case".
A service application is at the core of any good service organization, and should be seen as an asset rather than a liability.
G.
Service, whether it's software, hardware, helpdesk, whatever, is very hard to generalize.
Everyone wants to do things their own way and everyone has some weird little set of extra requirements. So every package that's available has already choked to death and drowned in features that most people will not need.
You get web UIs with tabs containing tabs containing hundreds of fields, of which a typical customer will probably use about 2-5%, and they'll end up stuffing information into them that they weren't originally intended to contain.
I really can't think of an application domain that cries out for a completely custom solution in almost every case.
G.
Consider something like POV-Ray, since it's a programming environment with a visual payoff.
Show someone a simple program that generates 10 randomly positioned mirrored sphere over a checkered landscape then encourage them to play with the number of sphere, assign colors to them, etc.
Much more interesting to be able to *see* the output of your program than just reading "Hello World!".
G.
Open Source development is an absolutely amazing and powerful tool... ...for everyone in the world whose livelihood comes from something *other* than selling software.
Bankers need to run their banks more efficiently so they get together to cooperatively develop some banking application software that makes them all work more effectively and efficiently. This is the magic of co-op software development. There are other people who have the same problems you do, and if you get together you can produce really useful software for vanishingly small cost, and the result can be replicated without limit or expense.
Bankers don't, on the other hand, create free, zero-income banks.
Commerceial software companies making free software is, and always has been, a really dumb idea.
If you find yourself in this position, my suggestion is to move up the food chain towards applications of the software you've developed. Eventually you'll find a level where people have problems they're willing to pay to have solved because they're not common enough to make an open source / co-op solution viable.
If your business plan reads:
1) Invent really cool new product.
2) Give it away for free.
3) Enable the community to do all their own support and enhancements.
4) ????
5) Profit!
let me save you some time and point out that there is nothing you can put in step 4 that leads to step 5.
Open source development is not a segment of the software indusrty, it's a segment of the every-other-industry.
G.
Yes, if you're in the business of software to do X, then making a free version of software to do X is stupid because if you're successful then eventually you will be out of business, sorry.
The magic of open source / cooperative development is that you have multiple people who share a common problem who gain great leverage by working together to produce something that all can use to solve that problem.
So farmers get together and write farming software, bankers get together and write banking software, etc., and this makes huge sense because the end result only enhances their businesses.
But software makers making free software is, and always has been, a fundamentally stupid business model, at least for those whose business plan does not clearly explain how they avoid this obvious trap, or who plan to "make it up in volume".
You need to be making your money off of something *other* than the free software you produce. Business plans based on selling support, customization, proprietary extensions, and the like are indeed ultimately doomed to failure as there's nothing stopping other people who NEED those things from doing it themselves better, faster, and cheaper than you can.
Open Source / Free software is a wonderful thing for society, it's just not so hot for the software "industry".
If you find yourself in this position, then my recommendation is to move out of the free-software "business" and move up into applications of that software, since that's where there will still be problems people are willing to pay to solve.
G.
To the best of my knowledge, the $2400 professional version of the software has no copy protection whatsoever. At least mine never has that I'm aware of.
Now, the license only allows you to install it on a single system and you have to pay several hundred dollars per year for Premium Service (which I do) in order to get a "home use" license that lets you run it on a second system legally. Also the home-use license is node-locked and expires when your service term is up (if you don't renew).
It's generally only users of the ~$100 student version (which is node-locked to a single system) who are likely to be whining about copy protection.
G.
"Perhaps this will cause the price of our TVs to drop?"
Um, except that they just added $585,000,000.00 to their cost of production, sure.
G.
At this point it probably IS Vista!
Do you think Microsoft re-writes the OS from scratch every time? No, they just incrementally change the previous version, and this happens slowly over the course of development. Since 7 is still a year or so away at this point they're just showing you mostly user interface changes with little or no changes to the core underlying os. By the time it releases there will probably be some significant changes, but right now I suspect you're mostly looking at a UI demo running on top of plain old Vista.
I keep seeing posts like "I tried out Windows 7 and it looks like all my software is 100% compatible and runs great!". Well duh, since it's the same OS you're running now.
Wait six months or so before passing judgement on this thing.
G.
My understanding is that the usual arrangement (such as for government employees) is that you agree as a term of employment to sell all patent rights to your employer.
The traditional price for this is one dollar per patent.
This is typically awarded at an annual event/dinner thing recognizing those people who were granted patents that year.
The recipients typically save the dollar bills so awarded and are quite proud of them.
I get the feeling that an employment agreement that says all patents will be signed over to the employer without payment are probably invalid as some money has to change hands (the $1) to make the transfer contractually binding. So any company thinking that their typical "we own every thought you have while you work for us" employment agreement / employee handbook may be in for a rude surprise if they're not compensating inventors for their patents.
But as always IANAL(tm).
G.
Spore has two problems. First of all it has rather annoying DRM that probably actually has negative effects on about 1% of its players. But more importantly it's just not that great of a game. It's style of play and features will probably appeal strongly to about 10% of players.
So the game is not going to do anywhere near as well as they hoped. But the gameplay problems are probably at *least* 10x more the cause of this than the DRM issues.
But who are the developers going to blame? Which do you think is more likely:
A) Developers admit "The game wasn't that good really. Next time we'll try harder. Sorry about the $50M we spent over four years."
B) Developers blame DRM protests saying "This game is a failure only because of the DRM related issues. We are saddened by the fact that so many people were pushed into bootlegging the game which prevented its being a commercial success."
Anyone else think "B" is slightly more likely?
The net result is that everyone blames the DRM stuff so that they don't have to take any personal blame for the failure. And so the anti-DRM crowd gain a huge win that will dramatically reduce DRM use in the future, even though DRM probably had little to do with the relative success of the game.
G.
P.S. After wandering through a computer store and seeing hundreds of copies of the game in both regular and collector's edition versions this weekend, I have a new tag-line for it:
Spore: It's what's in stock.
i disagree. i think there are a lot more competent programmers out there than there are visionary individuals. programming is a technical skill, but with most non-menial trades, it takes more than just technical prowess to succeed. you also need to be inspired or possess a little more creativity than the next guy.
Yes absolutely, and this is where the true genius lies. But it's skill in implementation, not skill in coming up with the original idea. The ones who succeed are the ones who can apply that visionary skill to every step of the design and implementation. These are people to whom you can give even a stupid idea and they'll turn it into something of significant value.
The gods of open source software development are people who had an idea that they thought was good (whether or not it actually was is somewhat irrelevant, the most important thing is that the TIME was right for it), AND they had the skill to implement it in a way that didn't suck.
Unfortunately there's also a lot of luck involved. Ideas can be bad, or worse they can be good ideas at the wrong time, or a bad idea will win out over better ideas due to market forces that outweigh the natural goodness of the alternatives.
Also related to this is that having been successful once is no guarantee you'll be able to do it again. Many fortunes have been gained and then lost again because the person thought "oh, look at my success, I must be an effing genius" when in reality a big part of their earlier success was just being in the right place at the right time.
G.
There's a really good thread about this on the Microsoft XNA game developer's forum:
http://forums.xna.com/forums/p/12407/65734.aspx
Worth reading for people who think their ideas are valuable and especially those who want help implementing them but are afraid to tell anyone about them for fear they'll be stolen.
If you want to work in a field where ideas have significant value then go into marketing or advertising, or become a short story writer.
In the software world:
1) Ideas have vanishingly small value. Only implementations of ideas are worth anything.
2) Everyone has more ideas than they could ever implement.
3) Chances are good that others already had your special idea many times before. Never ever get hung up on the idea that someone might, or has, stolen your idea. In general ideas themselves are not protectable or are not worth worrying about.
4) People do not steal unproven ideas, they steal proven ones. So tell everyone your secret idea because it might help you and won't hurt, and if you are successful then they're all going to steal your idea at that point anyway.
5) Nobody wants to write your software for you. If we're going to work on something then we're going to use our own ideas. If you like your idea then go implement it because NOBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD IS GOING TO DO IT FOR YOU.
6) So get started. Making a beginning is half the battle. Don't just think and plan. Write some code. Produce some permanent artifact from your work every day.
7) Successful open-source projects start out as COMPLETE WORKING SYSTEMS written by the person or people who had the original "itch". Once there's something there that you can use then other people will start using it and then they'll want to make changes and enhancements. So don't expect any volunteer help until the project is already mostly "done" from your own point of view.
8) If you release a product using your idea, and someone else copies the idea and gets rich when you don't, then it's because they did a better job than you did and you need to get over it. If you sit around thinking that billion dollars should have been yours and they screwed you and you deserve more then it will totally destroy your life. The competition is not about who has the best cool sexy idea, it's about who can make the idea into something real and successful.
All ideas should be like supermarket coupons. They should have a little note at the bottom that says "cash value 1/100 of one cent".
G.
Just don't make the mistake of thining that any part of the wedding process (past the proposal) is about you :)
The short answer is "whatever she wants".
G.
Yeah, I too looked at this when it came out and didn't get it initially. The first thought most of us have is that it's there to prey on stupid people or clumsy clickers. And it's annoying to have to worry about $1,000 apps in and among the $3 ones.
But on reflection I think this is absolutely as viable and acceptable as any other crazy luxury good that people buy to show off. Watches that cost thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of dollars, jewel encrusted cell phones, and $5,000 designer items that are more poorly made than the $29 Wal-Mart version.
It's a stroke of genius on the part of the developer (in being the first to think of this and having the balls to do it), and now the publicity has turned it into a legitimate thing that now has the recognition that such a luxury item requires. Who will buy a $250,000 watch if nobody else knows it was expensive?
He can probably sell 100 or more of these things if Apple puts it back up on the store, and I say more power to him.
It would be nice if Apple would add an iTunes account setting for maximum allowable item price so I can set mine up to not be able to accidentally by anything that costs more than $20.
Of course within days I'm sure we'll see a whole slew of applications on the app store named "I'm Poor" that are free and parody the "I'm Rich" app in one way or another. Like one that replicates the look of the original exactly but re-renders the gem picture using the index of refraction of cubic zerconia.
G.
The average weight of cremated remains for an adult male is six pounds according to Wikipedia, but weight is so limited in these rocket launches that they're only sending an ounce or two of the remains each time.
So there's plenty more Scotty to go around.
G.
Remember the light pen? The touch screen? The head position tracking pointer? All gone from general use.
The problem is that most of these alternative input devices require either more physical effort than moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, or they require learning fine motor control over muscles that aren't normally used for that sort of thing and so the learning process will give the user so much pain that they'll give it up before it ever gets a chance.
Light pens and touch screens require lifting your arm up into the air which is much more effort than using the mouse.
The mouse is nearly the perfect input device and is likely to remain the #1 general purpose input device for a LONG time to come. Painless, intuitive, low-effort.
Exotic and specialized input devices will always have a place, but generally only in specialized and exotic situations.
G.
China is clearly the big up and coming economy, and being able to interact with them in their own language is going to be a huge advantage. Yeah, the ones you meet all learned to speak English, but whoever knows the other's language has the advantage. If you want to win, you gotta speak the lingo.
If I were in school at this point, I would be learning everything I could about China.
G.
The only problem with "one toolset" is picking the set of tools to be included. If people are suggesting tools that are new or had major changes in the last year or two then you're probably screwed because people are just heat-seeking to the latest trendy tool chain.
Any set of tools you pick is going to look pretty hairy in a couple years, and to be worthwhile a "one toolset" initiative really needs to be stuck-to for 5-10 years in a typical business environment. Anything less and you might as well just pick a new toolset for every project, since you're not going to get the benefit of standardization except over a long period of time.
So my recommendation when people suggest this is to require them to pick a set of tools that existed two years ago, and restrict versions to things upwards compatible to what existed then.
When forced to go through this exercise people tend to go "ewww, who wants to use that old stuff", but that's exactly where you're going to be in a couple years, and you need to be sure you're not using the "one toolset" initiative as a way to sneak in someone's idea of what this year's sexy hot new tools are.
The trick is sticking with your choices long enough to get the benefits, and not just abandoning them as soon as the downsides of your tool choices become apparent.
In general I think there's great benefit in making a "one toolset" decision, but only *if* you can actually stick with it through all the eventual pain and suffering. But I've never yet seen anyone (voluntarily) achieve that. If you try this then best of luck, and try to get buy-in from the people who own the company, not just the IT director of-the-week who might leave in 18 months and get replaced with someone with totally different ideas.
G.
The whole thing was a plot by Tyriel to allow him to arrange the destruction of the world stone, the only thing standing in the way of his final conquest of heaven and earth.
Tyriel is clearly going to be the end boss of D3.
G.
I've noticed that almost all of the news headlines covering this are qualified statements like "Lander finds water on Mars, according to scientists". As if they're afraid to actually say something straightforward like "Water found on Mars" and they have to make it clear that they're just reporting what someone else is saying (with the implication that maybe they don't really believe it). At the same time they seem to have no problem with other headlines like "Celebrity Arrested Drunk" without the need to qualify it as "Celebrity Arrested Drunk According To Police" etc.
Maybe it's just me, but I mind it a bit irksome that so many big news outlets seem so detached from any sort of science reporting these days.
G.
I think that would be a very interesting statistic.
G.
Darn, and here I was thinking that they'd finally found a way to clean up the CB band :)
G.
Walmart fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never buy any kind of application software from Hewlett-Packard! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
Seriously, HP has the worst cace of attention deficit disorder of any company I've ever seen. I've spent 25 years watching them announce "the next big thing" only to completely forget about it a year later after having sold it to three big customers (who are then completely screwed of course). Anyone who buys a proprietary solution from them at this point deserves what they get.
G.