You should read the short story "... And Now The News." It's truly one of the most eye opening short stories that nobody knows about. In many ways, it's a gloriously alternative view about the sadness of life and the optimism that people can have. Truly one of the best stories I'd recommend to anyone.
Netflix replaced a model whose business parameters they controlled (DVD by mail) with a model whose business parameters they do not control (licensing streaming content). Eventually, Netflix will be forced to become a Cable TV provider that streams videos on demand; you'll sign up to Netflix and then pay an extra $10 per month for access to Universal movies, $5 for access to Comedy Central, and so on.
Classroom lectures are somewhere between 30-60% of the educational value of school. The remaining 40-70% is direct communication with the teacher, interaction with your peers, homework, and performance evaluation.
I'm not certainly convinced that Khan academy videos are better than an in-person teacher, but they have a few key advantages: 1) they are free, and 2) they are available at any time.
Beyond that, I certainly hope there's a way to continue to improve videos and instruction. Teaching in general is ripe for open source improvements. Why do we keep paying for textbooks each year? Why not have a single open source textbook that can be read on a tablet PC, eReader, or printed as a PDF?
Frankly, we pay a lot more money for non-teacher parts of education. Even if teaching is abolished, we'll have to have someone take care of our kids and make sure they do their lessons. Whatever we call that person, the job description sure sounds like a teacher to me.
I use a WYSIWYG editor all the time. I have Notepad++ open in one window, and Chrome in the other. I right click on any element that shows up incorrectly, and select "inspect element". I can then edit it until it's right, and preserve my changes in Notepad++ in the other window.
I've never heard of Dreamweaver though. The name sounds like this program I used to use ten years ago that caused endless nightmares.
If a mobile phone provider is offering multiple plans, there should be a law that requires them to bill each customer according to the plan that costs them the least money each month.
There's absolutely no reason to punish consumers by forcing them to study arcane documents, analyze and pore over their past usage, then get dinged for hundreds of dollars of overages each month when someone accidentally uses a feature they didn't sign up for.
Make it a law. No screwing your customers by making things so complex they accidentally pick an inefficient plan.
Within weeks of passing this law, carriers would stop offering hundreds of pointless options. You would no longer have to go through a maze of plans, options, features, and worrying choices.
Government has the power to make our lives easier, and it should be doing that.
You're completely delusional. My relatives in Ireland, England, and Australia have much better healthcare than we have here in the US. They don't have to waste ages filling out forms; they just get care because they are citizens. And you know what? They pay less for their healthcare than we do.
Yes, you heard that right: we pay as much in taxes for Medicare & Medicaid as they do for universal healthcare. Plus, on top of medicare/medicaid, we also pay private insurance. Here's a breakdown of how we pay through the nose for our stupid healthcare system. http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/oecd042111.cfm
We should stop paying private companies and make Medicare universal. There's no reason healthcare in the US should be so miserable. If you still want a private plan, great, but stop making me pay twice what my cousins pay.
Why is wiki better than all the other structured systems out there? Because you can easily add all the notes that just don't have places to go. There are always "weird things" you want to add to the comments; there are always hyperlinks you want to make; and there is always the need to update something in a flexible way that structured systems don't allow.
We had a wiki system that documented all our IP allocations for servers; and we linked all the servers to the pages for how to rebuild them if they burned to the ground; and we linked all the network devices to the support contact information and contract numbers for all the vendors we needed to call if they went down; and the system was phenomenal. Anytime something had a problem, you looked it up and there was a direct link to how to solve the problem, or a note from the previous time the same thing happened, and a cross-link to the other system that depended on it.
Even better, there was no stupid restriction preventing you from annotating something. Whenever I wanted to add a description to something, or a comment on an exception, or if I wanted to flag an IP address as "I think this is correct but it might be getting its address from DHCP and I'm not sure it's permanent", there was no enforcement. I could add it, and people could read it, and when it got confirmed the annotation went away.
If you need offline access to your wiki, buy an iPad and a 3G connection. It's far cheaper than spending $10k per year on a structured documentation system license.
Read books on new development methodologies. Doesn't matter how weird they are - I really liked the "Extreme Programming" book even though I didn't use much of it - but use them for ideas.
Read books on management ideas. Again, it doesn't matter how weird they are; just use them to get the ideas flowing.
Pick the one most promising idea that seems like it solves a problem your team is having. Maybe morale is low, so you kick off one afternoon to have an offsite meeting to gripe about the architecture at a frozen yogurt place, take notes, and use that to begin work on a new architecture.
Keep the ideas in place that work. We added a morning SCRUM to our general process, and it got rid of a lot of aimless development meetings.
Drop the ideas that don't work. We tried to have an all-hands 30 minute code review once per week, and it never worked. The presenter would show off something and people would either be too quiet or constantly asking distracting questions, and the code review never generated useful information. We switched to two-person code reviews - e.g. pair programming - and that worked.
Have you ever looked at our immigration rules? They're silly, selective, brutal, painful, time consuming - often taking a half dozen years - and there are only a tiny number of permits available.
The solution is to allow people who want to live in America to come to America. Why are we worried about allowing more people in? We have tons of unsold homes. There are a half dozen for sale in my block alone. I vote we let anyone who can buy a house get a green card right away and become a citizen after three years of good behavior owning that home.
The reason people keep investing in China is because that's where all the people are. Know what? There are tons of people who would rather be in America. Why not let them come to America and we'll take their investment instead?
Are you worried about paying welfare checks to immigrants? If that's the only thing stopping you, why not require immigrants to live in America for a decade before they can receive social services?
The trouble is, that's not the real reason some people dislike "illegal immigration". They dislike it because it brings more "foreign" people into America. They only want more people exactly like them. I apologise in advance if you're different.
Agreed. The designer in me goes nuts every time I see text artificially clipped on the right hand edge of the screen. It's just terrible; I hate feeling like the UI designer wrote text for the page and forgot to shrink it to fit in the width provided.
Subjectively, the Windows Phone UI always gives me the feeling that I'm "missing something". I always feel like there's something else I should see, but can't, because it's hidden or on another page. I never know quite where to go to get to something. The fact that tiles are freely arrangeable, and that they don't cover all features on the phone, means that I always feel like the tile screen is a "shortcut" to some magical better user interface that exists somewhere else at the bottom of the phone.
Contrast this to the iPhone UI. I know that every single thing in the iPhone is an "App". I know that I can see all the apps by going to the home screen and scrolling left or right. I know that if I lose track of something, that's how I can find it. Even if it's annoying to have to switch from one app to another, I never have to worry about how to get to something. The value of that reassurance is greater to me than the slowdown it causes.
On the contrary side, the Xbox Live UI is the opposite of the Windows Phone UI. No text is cut off; I never look at the screen and see distorted text or menus. Every single thing is a tile; I know if I scroll left or right I can see all of them. I would bet that over time the WinPhone will have the same UI approaches.
Meebo Bar is like a total perversion of everything they once did well. I used to love using Meebo since it provided a centralized place to track all my conversations. But when I started seeing the Meebo Bar appear elsewhere I ditched them. Who knew they'd all of a sudden be acquired just to obtain control of something horrible like this?
Why don't we require all cellphone companies to bill based on the number of packets you send via their online network? Then billing would be like your water or electricity bill. If you use more you pay more. Voice packets and data packets and text packets could all be considered equivalent. Phone hogs wouldn't make the network slow for the rest of us; we'd all pay for what we used.
My point is proven when you start saying that "wise people try to acquire things that maintain value."
If a rich person acquires a dollar and sits on that dollar, refusing to use it, that dollar does nobody any good. It's just a piece of paper in a safe.
The only way in which that dollar can be useful to anyone is if it causes person A to do work in return for person B's dollar, so it can then be given to person C, and so on. We want to encourage spending, because spending is how money generates utility in the economy. Our goal is not for everyone to have a pile of dollars underneath their mattress, it is for people to have the purchasing power necessary to buy the things they want. Forcing gradual inflation on people, as painful as it may be, is a way to prevent people from sitting on cash and not spending it.
Yeah that's right. Tell me, what has had value for thousands of years. I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon.
Inflation is necessary for the proper functioning of the economy. You may be scared to death of inflation, but if it did not exist, peoples' natural tendency to save would act like brakes to slow down commerce activity. Nobody thinks that hyperinflation is a good idea, and the federal reserve does a really good job of preventing it. But inflation that varies between 0% - 5% per annum helps to encourage people to invest now rather than sit on piles of money that do nobody any good.
How can you be sure this is correct? A pile of money sitting on the ground all year long does nobody any good. Its net value to the economy is zero. Whether that money is paper or gold, it accomplishes nothing. On the other hand, a pile of money that is used as tender to exchange value between people lots of times generates tons of activity; it enables people to work, to feed their families, to buy entertainment, to do pretty much anything. Part of the reason the American economy is so huge and other countries' economies are so small is that America has lots of transactions that multiply the value of the currency that is in circulation.
Don't be scared of "politicians printing money". You should be much more scared about what will happen when people realize that gold is getting scarce and they should just buy it and sit on it and never spend it.
nativism and xenophobia
TY, I learned a new word. He thinks that we have laws for immigration that should be followed and that the current immigration process should be streamlined. I guess that's xenophobia? lol
America's immigration laws are self-defined. We wrote them, so we decide what is legal and what is illegal. It's purely a farce to say "This kind of immigration is illegal so they shouldn't do it." The opposite is true: we didn't want it to happen, so we made it illegal. Laws preventing people from migrating to America are a recent invention, and frankly they're doing more harm than good.
There are tons of talented people all around the world who wish they could live in America and start businesses and buy houses. We have lots of unemployed people who would love to work for a talented Chinese scientist or Indian doctor. We have tons of empty houses and it would be really neat if enterprising Latin Americans bought these homes and occupied them. Why aren't we willing to change our immigration laws to encourage people to immigrate?
Also, there seems to be a lot of chromatic distortion on the image. Check out the clouds - there are three separate registrations for each color in the cloud image. Were their optics not calibrated, or did they take each color picture separately?
But... Rich hasn't completed his project. And Rich has a terrible history of overpromising and underperforming deliveries (i.e. comic release schedules).
I'm sure he's being transparent, and he's a really good artist and very well intentioned. I'm just not sure he's going to be able to follow through on everything he promises.
I heard a fantastic quote once from actor Rutger Hauer. He was being interviewed on his tiny role in some big blockbuster movie and the interviewer asked him if he thought his role was great. He replied "Great... I got a chance to be great once. I took it, and I was great. I won't ever have that chance again, but I was, once." A wonderful bittersweet vision.
I suppose when you've created arguably the most significant microprocessor that ever existed, you get to feel that rules don't apply to you. Although the Pentium Pro team could give him a run for his money.
Anyways, I certainly don't begrudge these important old-timers the credit for their work well done.
Also worth mentioning: Jack Tramiel was the only person who ever won a business deal over Bill Gates. When Jack Tramiel was looking for a BASIC for his computers - the Commodore PET specifically - he called in Bill Gates and wrung the worst deal out of him that anyone has ever produced. It's documented in the fantastic "Commodore" book by Brian Bagnall (http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0973864966/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1334012789&sr=8-3).
Every Commodore computer used Bill Gates' BASIC code and Bill got a pittance.
Bill Gates has never since let anyone get the best of him. I suspect the experience of getting Tramieled directly led to his success in negotiating the rights to PC-DOS and winning the IBM PC contract.
Here's to you, Jack. You gave Chuck Peddle the chance to be great, and you scared Bill Gates into building modern computers. That's a pretty damn good run.
Re:The technology created of OS/2 lives on in Wind
on
25 Years of IBM's OS/2
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· Score: 1
Your comment is truly awesome. I remember binary coding back in those days; frankly I'm amazed at the amount of work you and your team produced in the mid-80s. It took me literally a year after reading Petzold's book to realize that a handle was actually a memory pointer within a heap.
Yep. Demos sure look clean if you remove A) all the necessary controls that allow you to do useful work, and B) the context that helps the human eye figure out how data point relates to the overall picture.
This is much more a "dashboard demo" than an "application demo". But dashboards are hot right now; everyone wants one. Certainly no harm in offering appealing dashboards except that they obscure how much work is required in order to make a dashboard show something useful in a relevant context.
I only saw the first one; it was awesome and had Orson Welles in it. Who knew they could still afford Japanese animators and Nelson Shin after all these years?
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the short story "... And Now The News." It's truly one of the most eye opening short stories that nobody knows about. In many ways, it's a gloriously alternative view about the sadness of life and the optimism that people can have. Truly one of the best stories I'd recommend to anyone.
Here's the link:
http://books.google.com/books/about/And_Now_the_News.html?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC
Some more commentary:
http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/faq.html
I would have said that this was funny, but have you seen the guys at JPL? If anything defines hippies today it's them.
Those guys are beyond awesome. I've never met a crew of people who make space more exciting.
Netflix replaced a model whose business parameters they controlled (DVD by mail) with a model whose business parameters they do not control (licensing streaming content). Eventually, Netflix will be forced to become a Cable TV provider that streams videos on demand; you'll sign up to Netflix and then pay an extra $10 per month for access to Universal movies, $5 for access to Comedy Central, and so on.
I've watched them.
Classroom lectures are somewhere between 30-60% of the educational value of school. The remaining 40-70% is direct communication with the teacher, interaction with your peers, homework, and performance evaluation.
I'm not certainly convinced that Khan academy videos are better than an in-person teacher, but they have a few key advantages: 1) they are free, and 2) they are available at any time.
Beyond that, I certainly hope there's a way to continue to improve videos and instruction. Teaching in general is ripe for open source improvements. Why do we keep paying for textbooks each year? Why not have a single open source textbook that can be read on a tablet PC, eReader, or printed as a PDF?
Frankly, we pay a lot more money for non-teacher parts of education. Even if teaching is abolished, we'll have to have someone take care of our kids and make sure they do their lessons. Whatever we call that person, the job description sure sounds like a teacher to me.
I use a WYSIWYG editor all the time. I have Notepad++ open in one window, and Chrome in the other. I right click on any element that shows up incorrectly, and select "inspect element". I can then edit it until it's right, and preserve my changes in Notepad++ in the other window.
I've never heard of Dreamweaver though. The name sounds like this program I used to use ten years ago that caused endless nightmares.
If a mobile phone provider is offering multiple plans, there should be a law that requires them to bill each customer according to the plan that costs them the least money each month.
There's absolutely no reason to punish consumers by forcing them to study arcane documents, analyze and pore over their past usage, then get dinged for hundreds of dollars of overages each month when someone accidentally uses a feature they didn't sign up for.
Make it a law. No screwing your customers by making things so complex they accidentally pick an inefficient plan.
Within weeks of passing this law, carriers would stop offering hundreds of pointless options. You would no longer have to go through a maze of plans, options, features, and worrying choices.
Government has the power to make our lives easier, and it should be doing that.
You're completely delusional. My relatives in Ireland, England, and Australia have much better healthcare than we have here in the US. They don't have to waste ages filling out forms; they just get care because they are citizens. And you know what? They pay less for their healthcare than we do.
Yes, you heard that right: we pay as much in taxes for Medicare & Medicaid as they do for universal healthcare. Plus, on top of medicare/medicaid, we also pay private insurance. Here's a breakdown of how we pay through the nose for our stupid healthcare system.
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/oecd042111.cfm
We should stop paying private companies and make Medicare universal. There's no reason healthcare in the US should be so miserable. If you still want a private plan, great, but stop making me pay twice what my cousins pay.
Oh, and by the way, Australia is not a depressed economy. And no, doctors don't consider quitting over "Obamacare". Creating a phony survey isn't the same as actually doing real work:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/10/comically-awful-survey-says-83-percent-of-docto/187029
Seconding the wiki.
Why is wiki better than all the other structured systems out there? Because you can easily add all the notes that just don't have places to go. There are always "weird things" you want to add to the comments; there are always hyperlinks you want to make; and there is always the need to update something in a flexible way that structured systems don't allow.
We had a wiki system that documented all our IP allocations for servers; and we linked all the servers to the pages for how to rebuild them if they burned to the ground; and we linked all the network devices to the support contact information and contract numbers for all the vendors we needed to call if they went down; and the system was phenomenal. Anytime something had a problem, you looked it up and there was a direct link to how to solve the problem, or a note from the previous time the same thing happened, and a cross-link to the other system that depended on it.
Even better, there was no stupid restriction preventing you from annotating something. Whenever I wanted to add a description to something, or a comment on an exception, or if I wanted to flag an IP address as "I think this is correct but it might be getting its address from DHCP and I'm not sure it's permanent", there was no enforcement. I could add it, and people could read it, and when it got confirmed the annotation went away.
If you need offline access to your wiki, buy an iPad and a 3G connection. It's far cheaper than spending $10k per year on a structured documentation system license.
It looked really cool in person. The glow was magnificent. It went on for what felt like much longer than the videos show.
Read books on new development methodologies. Doesn't matter how weird they are - I really liked the "Extreme Programming" book even though I didn't use much of it - but use them for ideas.
Read books on management ideas. Again, it doesn't matter how weird they are; just use them to get the ideas flowing.
Pick the one most promising idea that seems like it solves a problem your team is having. Maybe morale is low, so you kick off one afternoon to have an offsite meeting to gripe about the architecture at a frozen yogurt place, take notes, and use that to begin work on a new architecture.
Keep the ideas in place that work. We added a morning SCRUM to our general process, and it got rid of a lot of aimless development meetings.
Drop the ideas that don't work. We tried to have an all-hands 30 minute code review once per week, and it never worked. The presenter would show off something and people would either be too quiet or constantly asking distracting questions, and the code review never generated useful information. We switched to two-person code reviews - e.g. pair programming - and that worked.
Keep making changes, but don't overload the team.
Have you ever looked at our immigration rules? They're silly, selective, brutal, painful, time consuming - often taking a half dozen years - and there are only a tiny number of permits available.
The solution is to allow people who want to live in America to come to America. Why are we worried about allowing more people in? We have tons of unsold homes. There are a half dozen for sale in my block alone. I vote we let anyone who can buy a house get a green card right away and become a citizen after three years of good behavior owning that home.
The reason people keep investing in China is because that's where all the people are. Know what? There are tons of people who would rather be in America. Why not let them come to America and we'll take their investment instead?
Are you worried about paying welfare checks to immigrants? If that's the only thing stopping you, why not require immigrants to live in America for a decade before they can receive social services?
The trouble is, that's not the real reason some people dislike "illegal immigration". They dislike it because it brings more "foreign" people into America. They only want more people exactly like them. I apologise in advance if you're different.
Agreed. The designer in me goes nuts every time I see text artificially clipped on the right hand edge of the screen. It's just terrible; I hate feeling like the UI designer wrote text for the page and forgot to shrink it to fit in the width provided.
Subjectively, the Windows Phone UI always gives me the feeling that I'm "missing something". I always feel like there's something else I should see, but can't, because it's hidden or on another page. I never know quite where to go to get to something. The fact that tiles are freely arrangeable, and that they don't cover all features on the phone, means that I always feel like the tile screen is a "shortcut" to some magical better user interface that exists somewhere else at the bottom of the phone.
Contrast this to the iPhone UI. I know that every single thing in the iPhone is an "App". I know that I can see all the apps by going to the home screen and scrolling left or right. I know that if I lose track of something, that's how I can find it. Even if it's annoying to have to switch from one app to another, I never have to worry about how to get to something. The value of that reassurance is greater to me than the slowdown it causes.
On the contrary side, the Xbox Live UI is the opposite of the Windows Phone UI. No text is cut off; I never look at the screen and see distorted text or menus. Every single thing is a tile; I know if I scroll left or right I can see all of them. I would bet that over time the WinPhone will have the same UI approaches.
Screenshots here:
http://imgur.com/a/rAnZs
Wow, first read I had to look at the date.
Meebo Bar is like a total perversion of everything they once did well. I used to love using Meebo since it provided a centralized place to track all my conversations. But when I started seeing the Meebo Bar appear elsewhere I ditched them. Who knew they'd all of a sudden be acquired just to obtain control of something horrible like this?
Why don't we require all cellphone companies to bill based on the number of packets you send via their online network? Then billing would be like your water or electricity bill. If you use more you pay more. Voice packets and data packets and text packets could all be considered equivalent. Phone hogs wouldn't make the network slow for the rest of us; we'd all pay for what we used.
My point is proven when you start saying that "wise people try to acquire things that maintain value."
If a rich person acquires a dollar and sits on that dollar, refusing to use it, that dollar does nobody any good. It's just a piece of paper in a safe.
The only way in which that dollar can be useful to anyone is if it causes person A to do work in return for person B's dollar, so it can then be given to person C, and so on. We want to encourage spending, because spending is how money generates utility in the economy. Our goal is not for everyone to have a pile of dollars underneath their mattress, it is for people to have the purchasing power necessary to buy the things they want. Forcing gradual inflation on people, as painful as it may be, is a way to prevent people from sitting on cash and not spending it.
goldbuggery
Yeah that's right. Tell me, what has had value for thousands of years. I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon.
Inflation is necessary for the proper functioning of the economy. You may be scared to death of inflation, but if it did not exist, peoples' natural tendency to save would act like brakes to slow down commerce activity. Nobody thinks that hyperinflation is a good idea, and the federal reserve does a really good job of preventing it. But inflation that varies between 0% - 5% per annum helps to encourage people to invest now rather than sit on piles of money that do nobody any good.
How can you be sure this is correct? A pile of money sitting on the ground all year long does nobody any good. Its net value to the economy is zero. Whether that money is paper or gold, it accomplishes nothing. On the other hand, a pile of money that is used as tender to exchange value between people lots of times generates tons of activity; it enables people to work, to feed their families, to buy entertainment, to do pretty much anything. Part of the reason the American economy is so huge and other countries' economies are so small is that America has lots of transactions that multiply the value of the currency that is in circulation.
Don't be scared of "politicians printing money". You should be much more scared about what will happen when people realize that gold is getting scarce and they should just buy it and sit on it and never spend it.
nativism and xenophobia
TY, I learned a new word. He thinks that we have laws for immigration that should be followed and that the current immigration process should be streamlined. I guess that's xenophobia? lol
America's immigration laws are self-defined. We wrote them, so we decide what is legal and what is illegal. It's purely a farce to say "This kind of immigration is illegal so they shouldn't do it." The opposite is true: we didn't want it to happen, so we made it illegal. Laws preventing people from migrating to America are a recent invention, and frankly they're doing more harm than good.
There are tons of talented people all around the world who wish they could live in America and start businesses and buy houses. We have lots of unemployed people who would love to work for a talented Chinese scientist or Indian doctor. We have tons of empty houses and it would be really neat if enterprising Latin Americans bought these homes and occupied them. Why aren't we willing to change our immigration laws to encourage people to immigrate?
Also, there seems to be a lot of chromatic distortion on the image. Check out the clouds - there are three separate registrations for each color in the cloud image. Were their optics not calibrated, or did they take each color picture separately?
But... Rich hasn't completed his project. And Rich has a terrible history of overpromising and underperforming deliveries (i.e. comic release schedules).
I'm sure he's being transparent, and he's a really good artist and very well intentioned. I'm just not sure he's going to be able to follow through on everything he promises.
I heard a fantastic quote once from actor Rutger Hauer. He was being interviewed on his tiny role in some big blockbuster movie and the interviewer asked him if he thought his role was great. He replied "Great... I got a chance to be great once. I took it, and I was great. I won't ever have that chance again, but I was, once." A wonderful bittersweet vision.
I suppose when you've created arguably the most significant microprocessor that ever existed, you get to feel that rules don't apply to you. Although the Pentium Pro team could give him a run for his money.
Anyways, I certainly don't begrudge these important old-timers the credit for their work well done.
Also worth mentioning: Jack Tramiel was the only person who ever won a business deal over Bill Gates. When Jack Tramiel was looking for a BASIC for his computers - the Commodore PET specifically - he called in Bill Gates and wrung the worst deal out of him that anyone has ever produced. It's documented in the fantastic "Commodore" book by Brian Bagnall (http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0973864966/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1334012789&sr=8-3).
Every Commodore computer used Bill Gates' BASIC code and Bill got a pittance.
Bill Gates has never since let anyone get the best of him. I suspect the experience of getting Tramieled directly led to his success in negotiating the rights to PC-DOS and winning the IBM PC contract.
Here's to you, Jack. You gave Chuck Peddle the chance to be great, and you scared Bill Gates into building modern computers. That's a pretty damn good run.
Your comment is truly awesome. I remember binary coding back in those days; frankly I'm amazed at the amount of work you and your team produced in the mid-80s. It took me literally a year after reading Petzold's book to realize that a handle was actually a memory pointer within a heap.
Kudos on you ;)
Yep. Demos sure look clean if you remove A) all the necessary controls that allow you to do useful work, and B) the context that helps the human eye figure out how data point relates to the overall picture.
This is much more a "dashboard demo" than an "application demo". But dashboards are hot right now; everyone wants one. Certainly no harm in offering appealing dashboards except that they obscure how much work is required in order to make a dashboard show something useful in a relevant context.
They made three transformers movies???
I only saw the first one; it was awesome and had Orson Welles in it. Who knew they could still afford Japanese animators and Nelson Shin after all these years?
/sign
Thank you for reminding us that we don't have to suffer fools forever. We can, and should, insist on a slightly higher standard.