I strongly disagree with the author's comment about saving documents, but not for the reason that most people think.
The problem with eliminating save and only having one version (the version that is currently open, which is reflected in the file on the disk) is that you eliminate a primitive sort of "versioning" where the saved document on disk represents an older version of the document. The "save" command becomes a sort of "push current version out" and "revert" becomes a sort of "roll back changes to last version."
Now I would happily eliminate the "save" menu from my programs, but only if we could replace it with a "mark version" and "rollback version" command which would allow me to maintain several versions of the same document. That is, I wouldn't mind if we created a word processor which saved the current version of the document to disk as it was typed, but only if I have the power to mark different document versions and either roll back to an older version or mark the contents as the current version in that file.
I strongly believe this is the reason why eliminating the "save" command was not accepted by MacOS usability testing when they were working on OpenDoc. OpenDoc eliminated file saving entirely, and users hated it--because users were using the "save" command and "revert" command as a sort of "commit changes/rollback changes" command--that is, as a primitive way of version control. And OpenDoc, by eliminating the save command, took that away from users.
Don't take away file version control; give me a more powerful version of it!
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
A "public good" is not something which every stinking last citizen of that country needs, wants or uses. Libraries are also a public good dispite the fact that they are only useful to people who can read, who are able to travel there, and who want to use them.
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one. In the same way, mass transit is a "public good" dispite the fact that the only people who can use mass transit are people who live near the stations. (Meaning the Federal dollars subsidizing the Amtrak raillines in New York--something which my tax dollars help to support--are unusable to me as I live in California.)
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
There has been a tremendous amount of research done into creating civic projects which minimize the need for transportation, or attempt to create transportation corridors which allow the use of mass transit in a more efficient manner.
The problem is twofold. First, there are a lot of people, and by and large most of them don't want to live in a cramped little apartment building in a 200 floor skyrise for the sake of minimizing the horizontal distance they need to travel to work. Most people would rather live in houses and housing developments--and unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, when you get more than a few thousand houses together, you have a transportation problem that cannot be easily solved by busing or rail.
Second, when you get more than a few thousand people in the same town, the combinatorial problem of N people (where N is large--such as Los Angeles, where you're pushing tens of millions), and M places they need to go (such as work, grocery store, etc), and you have a severe transportation problem. Los Angeles is trying to fight the problem by creating time and economic incentives for people to move to transportation hubs--that is, they're trying to fight the problem by severely re-engineering the way people live in Los Angeles. But as I said before, people don't want to live in high rises, they want to live in houses--to the point where they'd rather spend three hours a day in a car to go to work every day so they can have their house.
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
Actually, even in the most severe places, you can arrive by when you want if you just pay attention to the traffic reports and leave early enough. While "I'm sorry I'm late; bad traffic" is occassionally true, more often than not it's the grown up version of "my dog ate my homework."
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
People's transportation uses tend to break down into three categories. There are personal errands (groceries, shopping), work, and recreational (going out to see a movie, etc.)
Do not confuse them just to make a hairbrained point. If you are not buying your daily personal errand products and services locally, what are you thinking? Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
And work is work--for the most part, businesses are required to provide sufficient parking for their employees, so if you are having a hard time finding a place to park at work, you should takl to your employers, not just assume that there is some sort of conspiracy to make your life difficult. (Life *is* difficult, it doesn't need a conspiracy.)
It's only the recreational areas where there is a problem with parking. But in general that's because most recreational areas (such as parks, movie theaters, etc) generally are not built with sufficient parking for peak usage, because it winds up being inefficient from a cost analysis standpoint. (Why build a four floor parking garage if 95% of the time, you will never use three of those floors?)
And in that case, there really is no good solution--except perhaps not going out to see a movie during peak times.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.
No it does not. Mass transportation of products is only efficient when you have a lot of product going from point A to point B. In fact, most of the United State's logistical infrastructure is now organized around that fact. That's why when you send a FedEx package to the next city over, it generally is flown into Memphis--because centralization of transportation corridors is more efficient than solving the O(N**2) problem of moving products directly to their destination.
But once you get to an endpoint--such as the Port of Los Angeles, or the Ralphs Grocery Distribution Hub in Los Angeles, or whatever other central hub that is serviced by rail--you now must rely on surface street traffic and trucks, not mass transit or public transportation--to move the product to the end store.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread.
I don't believe so.
The automobile solved two problems--which accounted for it's massive initial acceptance and for public pressure to create better roads. (Roads significanly predated cars by a few thousand years, by the way--even paved roads with lined beds were built by the Romans.)
The first problem cars solved was the expense and general hassle of owning a horse. Descriptions of the streets of New York's horse maneur problem, especially during the summer, is rather shocking. New York spent a significant amount of resources just cleaning horse droppings on a daily basis, and the illnesses that arose from horse droppings, as well as the stench was shocking. And while we are now (and rightfully so) concerned with the public health problems of car pollution, horse pollution was a real and rather terrible problem.
The second problem cars solved was that cars were more reliable and required less maintanance than horses. You didn't need to provide a stable and hay, or extra space. And that, along with Henry Ford's pricing efforts to bring the price of mass produced cars down to a reasonable level, allowed private individuals for the first time access at any form of private transportation whatsoever.
But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
The most "economically efficient" way for people to live is in massive studio apartment highrises clustered in tight little clusters around mass transportation corridors.
But, with the exception of Manhattan, people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high. They would rather live in their own house on a 1/4 acre lot in the suburbs--and once you start taking people's desires for space and elbow room into account, transportation goes from being a relatively simple exercise of moving people around from a small number of hubs to an O(n**2) problem of figuring out how to allow a person to efficiently go from just about anywhere in a several hundred square mile area to just about anywhere else in a several hundred square mile area.
And that's hard.
People do not want to live in an "economically efficient manner"--taken to the extreme, that would mean that people would wear all the same clothing and eat algae-based paste that wouldn't need to be moved in refrigerated trucks to the grocery store. Instead, people have certain desires (such as a nice house in the suburbs on a quiet street, or unique furnature and decorations, or to go to a movie and a quaint little restaurant in the next town) which makes transportation issues a royal pain in the ass.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno. But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient--that's absurd. And backwards: the question is not what is the most economically efficient solution, but what is the most economically efficient way to give people what they want--including that house in the suburbs which makes transportation by anything other than some form of powered motorized vehicle impractical.
The index was drawn up by asking journalists, researchers and legal experts to answer 50 questions about the whole range of press freedom violations (such as murders or arrests of journalists, censorship, pressure, state monopolies in various fields, punishment of press law offences and regulation of the media). The final list includes 139 countries. The others were not included in the absence of reliable information.
Translation: they sent questionares to 50 reporters in different countries asking how things were in their own country, and tallied the response.
The problem with this is that it's doesn't rank things like hard statistics, but ranks how people perceive their own freedoms in their own country. A country like the United States, which tends to be very self-critical over relatively minor infractions of personal liberty (such as the arrest of a dumb reporter who decides to test the airport security check-in with a real gun) is bound to rank lower than a country like Costa Rica (where reporters are probably happy that they are no longer being arrested and subject to torture for "insulting politicians.")
While this is an interesting web site and article, and a great source of inspiration for heated debates around the water cooler, I would take the overall ranking with a huge mound of salt.
And notice the bias, as well:
The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings.
The highest-ranked country of the South is Costa Rica, in 15th position. This Central American nation is traditionally the continent's best performer in terms of press freedom. In February 2002, it ceased to be one of the 17 Latin American states that still give prison sentences to those found guilty of "insulting" public officials. The murder in July 2001 year of journalist Parmenio Medina was an exception in the history of the Costa Rican media.
In the context provided, this implies that journalists are regularly murdered in the United States. And, by ranking a country that just 8 months ago stopped giving prison sentences to those found guilty of "insulting" public officials, it implies (by having a higher ranking than the United States) that U.S. reporters are regularly jailed for "insulting" public officials.
I'm not saying this bias is intentional. But the sodium levels in my blood have reached critical.
The public in the US is mainly educated in political matters by the press, especially cable media. Alternatives to the cable giants, ala BBC are not readily available. The cable media are owned by mega-corporations. It's no surprise that these corporations are interested in preserving their power through economic and political means.
Regardless if this is true or not, the reasons cited on the web site for the relative low score of the United States was not increasing megacorporate control of the press, but the arrest of reporters for violating clearly marked security zones and jailing reporters who had knowledge of a crime but who refused to divulge his information in the name of the "freedom of the press."
So increasing megacorporate control of the press was not a factor here.
As the principle software developer on Someone's in the Kitchen (the title helped pay the down payment on my house), I have to say I didn't realize this problem had made it to the published Microsoft Knowledge Base. Of all things...
Though I have to admit, the funniest bug report I ever tracked for that product was a timing error in a.wav file that got integrated into the Kitchen product. At one point, the 'Fridge says "Eeeek! A cockroach!."
Problem was, the wave file was cut short, and the play back of the audio stopped before the syllable "roach."
Needless to say fixing that problem before GM was slightly more important than the Blendolini Choco-Shake hang.
Okay, it sounds like what you really need to do is implement weekly status meetings, where at a particular time and place every week, everyone gets together and shares what's going on. The meeting doesn't need to be very formal, and trust me: doughnuts can help keep people in a good mood, and don't cost a lot.
But at each meeting you should have everyone go around the table and describe what they've worked on that week. Describe where they are in the code, how they're doing, any difficulties that have arisen. The meeting should never be judgemental; instead if someone is taking longer than expected, see if others can offer solutions or help. The whole theme should be group coherency; no-one is an island and no-one gets left behind or allowed to sink.
If you do have these meetings, it may be best to place them on a Thursday; that way people are motivated Tuesdays and Wednesdays to do something so they have something to show. And that way, they feel like they can have some breathing room Monday and some time Friday to either catch up or slack off, depending where they are in the project.
But always have them; insist everyone is there, and insist everyone share where they are. The meeting itself, if handled weekly for a small group of people should take no more than half an hour, so there is no excuse for the thing sucking down an entire day. And for God's sake, no presentations! Just an informal chat with the entire team there over doughnuts to discuss progress on the project.
So that leaves carving up the day into different parts or carving up the year into different parts. The French tried to go with a decimal month system after the French Revolution but it never caught on.
One major reason why the French Revolutionary Calendar never caught on for a couple of reasons, all revolving around the 10-day week. The principle problem was that it contained only one day off every 10 days, instead of 1 day off every 7. Aside from the Biblical implications (God made the Earth in 6 days, not 9, and a religious population isn't about to alter a fundamental aspect of their faith just to suit political reality), no-one wanted to have to work an extra three days before getting one off!
Oddly enough, the French Revolutionary Calendar was advocated as superior precisely because it contained fewer days off--which would be "good for the hard-working people." (Undoubtedly something advocated by a non-working aristocracy... *grin*)
One thing I forgot...so I'll say it here. If you plan well, and have good drawings, you can get a contractor to give you a fixed price for the whole job. If the price of materials goes up, the GC eats those costs.
If you, as an owner-builder, aren't getting fixed-price contracts from your subcontractors, you are a fool. Likewise--if you are a general contractor (a building contractor here in California) and you aren't getting fixed-price contracts from your own subs, you are a fool.
"Cost Plus" is sort of like trying to sell software through a publisher for a percentage of "net profit": the final reported costs can be so cooked as to rob you of any money you may have otherwise thought you'd get.
Of course, by going cost plus my contractor charged me a fixed fee (turned out to be about 7% of the construction cost), and I got his carpentry/labor crew of four for $55/hr plus all his regular subs - and they were all top notch.
I will bet you cash that he was not paying his carpentry/labor crew $55/hour. Around here in California, the framers don't get $55/hour, but a bit less. I'll bet you that he was padding the rate to $55/hour by claiming a kickback from the carpentry crew for "management overhead" or some such fool thing--that is, he was paying *himself* $55/hour, then using that pool to then pay off the carpentry/labor crew, and pocketing the rest.
Which goes to illustrate something else: if you think the building industry is an honest, above board industry when it comes to money, you're a fool: I have yet to meet a single contractor or subcontractor who wouldn't sell his own mother into slavery for a buck--which is one of the reasons why as an owner-builder you absolutely must watch the subcontractors like a hawk, learn how houses are supposed to go together so they don't cut corners, and make damned sure you watch the budget. Fixed-price contracts from your subs (who will moan and groan that it's not standard practice--bullshit, it is) is one way to watch your bottom line.
Well, here in Southern California, the term "McMansion" refers to those really large houses on really small lots you see littering the hillsides around here. Those houses are generally built by figuring out the maximum cubic feet allowed (by taking the setbacks and figuring out the buildable area, and the maximum allowed height of the building), and building the largest thing that will fit in that volume.
They're out of style in large part because they're ugly eyesores. The worse example of a "McMansion" I ever saw was some guy's 10,000 sqft monstrosity which was basically a cube which exactly fit in the setback and height requirements, and contained an indoor pool. The thing was a wonder to behold from the inside; from the outside it was a very large box--the ugliest possible building one could build in a residential neighborhood.
Smaller, well styled homes are in vogue here in California (which means they'll be in vogue in about 10 years throughout the rest of the country) in large part because they make better use of the lot space, and because they are more "creative" than a volume filling cube. Further, creating small outdoor spaces around the house (as sort of "entertaining rooms" surrounded by bushes and overhangs and foutains) is also in vogue--but that's probably something that won't translate well to, say, Montana.)
His subs, to whom he supplies work on a regular basis, will get to his job before yours - even if you called them first.
That's why you need to shop around for subcontractors before employing them--some subcontractors are flakier than others. Further, this sort of thing depends on the region where you are: some regions are more overbuilt than others, and some regions are more likely to have a few building firms who monopolize the subs.
Oh, one more thing. That lot you just paid $45,000 to buy? The buider paid $5,000 or less because he bought ten acres and cut it up into 10 lots.
I don't know how things are done in your state, but in the State of California, a land developer (the guy who buys land and breaks it up into smaller parcels for development) is as often as not a different animal than the building contractor, at least for custom homes. The only fellows I know who are buying large acrage and building their own houses are tract home developers. And while it's true that, as often as not, the building contractor may be getting a better price on the land from his developer buddy, the price difference (at least in California) is really not that significant towards the overall cost of the home.
Most people I know of who have lost their shirts building their own homes screwed up because they didn't watch their subs like hawks (as you point out), and because they blow their budget in modifications to the house made after construction already started.
Beware: you can get into trouble really quick
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The Owner-Builder Book
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· Score: 4, Informative
My parents are architectual drafters. (They're the ones you would go to for house plans and engineering if you were to build your own house.) I've watched while I was growing up several people try to build their own houses. And while many save a lot of money, an equal number of people get into serious financial problems really quick.
By the way, I bought a house rather than building my own, dispite being in a family who is in the construction business. Partly I did so because building your own house is a serious time commitment (you don't think that $20-80K savings comes for free, do you?), and partly because where I live (Los Angeles), the only available buildable lots are located tens of miles away from where I live. (The closest lots I could find in my price range were located about 30 miles from the Glendale/Pasadena/Burbank area where I worked--while the house I live in is in Glendale--I can see the downtown skyline from my front yard.)
Anyways, the two most common mistakes that I've seen are (a) overbuilding what you can afford, and (b) not settling on a design before beginning the construction process.
In the first problem, many people who try to build their own house try to "overbuild"; that is, they try to build a much bigger house than they really can afford. It's not that they can't afford the shell of the house; they just can't afford to put stuff in it, and plant the lawn, and pay for the cooling costs and everything else associated with house ownership. Sure, perhaps at $70/sqft you can afford to build a 4,000 sqft house--but all those rooms are going to look rather stupid if you don't have any money left over to buy furnature. Likewise, if you are paying all your money into making the strokes on your house loan, how are you going to pay for electricity, water, gas, sewar?
My parent's advise is to always build smaller than the biggest thing you can afford. Instead of building a 4,000 sqft house which maxes out your monthly budget (and omits property taxes, utilities, that extra T-1 line from the equation), build a 3,000 sqft house but then decorate it nicely.
Keep in mind that "McMansions" are no longer in style, by the way, but smaller (but cuter) "bungalo" houses are all the vogue nowadays. Your profits after reselling your house will be higher, and your enjoyment of your house will be greater, if you build under what you can afford, so you can live in your house comfortably.
The second mistake many people make, which eat up that $100K promised savings faster than an OC3 connection, is not to plan every detail of their house before pour the foundation. Meaning they will often decide, after the foundation is poured, that perhaps they really want a 9 ft. plate line instead of an 8 ft for higher ceilings, or maybe that downstairs bathroom should be moved over two feet so they can have a bigger closet. Granted, each change doesn't seem like it should cost that much, and often you think of things that didn't come to you in the planning phase that you really wished you had. But take it from someone who has seen a couple of folks driven to bankrupcy (literally!): creeping featurism in the house can suck your wallet dry.
Part of the problem is that a house is a complete system: each change you make can have consequences farther down the line which you didn't account for. For example, making the ceiling taller may only take an extra few thousand in framing costs--but it can have consequences on the plumbing of the second story, or the exterior windows, or the amount of siding you need: in short, that one change can seriously affect your budget in other areas in unexpected ways.
Further, unless you plan right down to the fixtures from day one, you may find yourself doing stupid things like throwing in the $800 sink instead of the planned $80 sink in the bathroom, or upgrading the kitchen cabinets, without realizing these things can quickly eat an additional $30K real fast. (When I redid the bathroom in our house, we upgraded the fixtures and cabinets. The price difference in that one upgrade (four prefab cabinets, two sinks, one toilet and one bathtub) was around $5K--for one 7x9 bathroom! We did it knowing the price, but some people just start writing checks without keeping track of their budget, and quickly blow their budget out of the water.)
Oh, and on finding the right subcontractors: I would seriously talk to the archetectual drafter or designer in your area for references. You'd be supprised the number of contractors out there who simply don't bother to show up at the job site, or who flake out, or who are completely incompetant.
And my other advise: learn how the framing schedule and the standard framing details work, as well as how siding should be applied and how wallboard should go up. (Pick up a book at your local "do it yourself" hardware store such as Home Depot.) You'd be supprised at the number of guys out there who will cut corners and use structurally unsound framing or construction techniques in order to cut corners or to use hardware he happens to have in the truck rather than going out to buy the correct fastener or the proper nails.
While I agree with most of your comments, just one point from another ol' timer. (Though only 15 years...):
Teach that it might be easier to use 'i' as a variable in a short loop, but loop-idx or object_idx make more sense.
Research suggests that, for complex equations and/or complex operations, shorter variable names are more easily recognized than longer variable names. That's because most people who learned algaebra recognize patterns in the equations, and using longer variable names makes the equations harder to recognize.
Thus, "force = gravitational_constant * object_1_mass * object_2_mass / (distance * distance)" takes a little more time for the brain to parse than "f = G*m1*m2/(r*r)", even though they represent the same thing.
With this in mind, I would suggest that if the iterator of a loop was being used as part of a mathematical operation (such as an array index), perhaps using 'i' will make the code more readable. However, if your iterator is not being used as part of a complex equation or represents an object (such as a pointer in a linked list), perhaps using a descriptive name makes more sense.
It's great; a new snack each month delivered to your door. I'm sure she'd get a kick out of monthly snacks...
Re:There ARE other ways
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Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
But, the history of the human race, indeed of our own civilization, doesn't bear it out. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ulysees, Shakespear, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and other artists too numerous to mention had all the incentive they needed to create the greatest works our civilization has ever known, all without the existence of copyright or any other form of "intellectual property."
So where does one find a sponsor for one's works? I would *love* to write software for the King of the United States of America, but as we don't have Kings, I'm not sure where to turn.
Oh, this one is too easy.
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
Copyrights: Copyrights are automatically assigned to the creator of the work for a period of 15 years. Copyrights may be renewed every 15 years indefinitely, but must be done so by the designated owner of the copyright, and if copyright is reassigned, the copyright office must be notified of that assignment.
The rational: creators should be granted a limited right to exclusivity of the use of their works automatically. However, in order to keep the copyright for longer than 15 years, the author (or owner) must proactively maintain and renew that copyright. This will allow large corporations (such as Disney) with an intellectual property portfolio they wish to keep to continue keeping that portfolio as long as they wish, but which allows the other 98% of works which are no longer really cared for to fall into the public domain after a reasonable period of time.
Patents Patents must be for material products or for items which cause a material change. In particular, patents cannot be extended to business techniques, mathematical formulas, or computer software. Further, patents live for 7 years, and can be extended once, by the legitimate patent holder, for an additional 7 year period, only if that patent holder can demonstrate he is actually using the patent.
Further, filing a patent with intent to deceive (by, for example, claiming a business technique patent by claiming the business technique when applied to a material product is a "material object") should be a fealony. Any person or corporation which is convicted of such fealony may lose the right to either file deceptive patents in the future, or may forfit their current patent portfolio into the public domain.
Same with copyrights: filing an "improper" copyright intentiionally with intent to deceive should be a fealony, and can cause someone who abuses this system to lose the right to renew their copyright portfolio.
Further, I would extend the right to "crack the corporate veil" to this, meaning that, in the event someone violates the law and loses the right to renew a copyright also means he does not have the right to circumvent this by incorporation.
If the RIAA or the MPAA intend to put teeth into the proposed punishments for violating "piracy", then we should also put teeth into proposed punishments for abusing the IP laws by corporations as well.
I believe, and it's been a long time since I had to care about his, that driving "faster than the posted speed limit" is in and of itself a violation - the common "speeding ticket". This is why you can get ticked for going 60 in a 55 on a clear, dry day with perfect visibililty and no traffic on the road - in other words, perfectly safe under the conditions.
It turns out in California that you in fact *are* permitted to drive above the posted speed limit, if you can demonstrate that the day was nice and clear, or that there was little traffic. The purpose of this exception, by the way, is to undermine the ability of local municipalities to set up "speed traps", where they set a short stretch of road 10 MPH under the rest of the throughway.
(This is also why a municipality in California can only enforce speed limit laws using radar guns on stretches of road which have had a 'speed survey', and set the speed limits accordingly. For those who don't know, a 'speed survey' is a survey where you measure the speed of every car going past a particular point for a period of time, and set the speed limit so that at least 85% of the cars measured during your test period are under that speed.)
The city where I live, Glendale, just got it's legal ass handed to it by a judge who said that the posted speed limits in Glendale were set too low, and advised my city to either update the speed limits, or lose the right to enforce speed limits within the city boundaries. (The evidence showed that Glendale set the speed limits lower than traffic engineers suggested or the speed surveys showed, in large part because of political pressure.)
But then, this is the law in California. Your milege may vary. (Pardon the pun.)
I own a ReplayTV with commercial skip. Yet I leave commercial skip off and use the '30-second' skip feature instead.
If an ad catches my eye, I'm more likely to back up, watch the entire ad, then move on. The fact that I can skip advertising for products I'm not interested in (such as for beer, which I don't drink), but watch ads for stuff I am interested in (the latest movies, for example, computers, and cars, as well as local ads for local shops and services) is one of the things I like about my ReplayTV.
If it weren't for an ad for a local store in Glendale where I live (Legacy Furnature), we would have never found the perfect wall-unit, shelves for our guest bedroom, and a few other items. They make the cutest gothic-style pine furnature, and are about the only local furnature company where I live which does so--saving us a trip clear out to Hollywood. But I digress.
Perhaps I'm odd, but if I could just screen ads I'm not interested in and play those I am interested in, I'd be a happy camper. How about a feature which allows me to vote on ads to indicate if I want to watch ads like it or not? I know--it would require a lot of infrastructure (such as a uniform method for marking what kind of ad is playing, and a mechanism for storing my ad watching preferences), but the feedback would tell people exactly what sort of consumer I am.
I would even happily give people my demographic information (linking my ad preferences to identifying information for direct mail ads) if I thought it would influence the sort of advertising information they sent me (and, more importantly, did *not* send me). That's because the biggest problem I face as a consumer is finding crap I want, movies that I can stand, and services that make me happy.
For me, it's not a question of whether PVRs which skip ads should be allowed. It's more a question of whether ads themselves should be allowed. The whole point of advertising is to increase desire for things you don't have, and are often better off without.
Actually, advertising serves three purposes. The first is to drive desire. The second is to give out information--for example, to give out information about upcoming movies or items which you may want but wouldn't have known about before. The third is to validate ownership of those things you already have: the Apple iMac ad, for example, validates those who just bought an iMac by reminding them how cool that gadget was.
It's rather funny, but consumer validation, especially for big ticket items such as for purchasing a car or a computer is a very important part about advertising. (It's something which ads from Gateway seem to miss, as their ads tend to be more 'functional', describing price/performance points, rather than 'pleasing', describing how cool Gateway computers are.) And consumer validation is also very important for on-going services, such as for cellular service or for internet services.
Stuck between 10 minutes of inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you are subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted manipulation inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Then don't watch.
I know a couple of people who don't even *own* television sets, who are otherwise happy and well-adjusted people. It's not like they force a television set into your room to be always on, a'la 1984...
You can't say "I shut my eyes everytime I drove past a speed limit sign" and expect a judge to let you off the hook for going 120.
You can't do that in California because the posted speed limit is legally considered an "advisory" sign. The actual speed limit in California for all roads is whatever speed is considered "safe" and "reasonable" for that particular area. (It's also why you could be doing 40 miles an hour in a 45 mph zone and still get a speeding ticket if conditions warrant--such as in heavy fog.)
EULAs are for all intents and purposes contracts which you agree to by clicking the "I Agree" button (or whatever); unfortunately for those who support EULAs, there are some restrictions on contractual enforcement, such as the notion of a "contract of coersion", where you are coerced to agree with a contract (such as the condition you are describing), and the problem of contract enforcability with contracts made with minors.
Speed limit signs, however, are not contracts. You don't agree to obey speed limit signs by the act of driving.
Being one of the "old guard" (I've been using Macs since 1984, and writing software for them since 1985), and being a Windows programmer since Windows 2.11(386), I can tell you for a fact that while PC users generally don't care about Mac users, if you had a Mac in your office, you were almost guarenteed to get a deriding comment from the PC user without any provocation whatsoever.
I never did understand that. That is, when I worked at JPL I had a Mac and a PC sitting on my desk. Inevitably when a PC-only person would walk into my cube, he would immediately comment on the "paperweight", or how overexpensive the Mac was, or how the WIMP interface was for wimps.
Generally, when comments started flying back and forth in person, it always started with a co-worker making a negative comment about the Macintosh--not because the Mac user went on the attack. And while it was never a big comment, after an entire day of "why do you use that paperweight" or "I thought you were a power-user until I saw your Macintosh" or whatever, it was hard not to snipe back.
I had a theory about that sniping from the PC folks, by the way: there is a certain expectation that using computers should be hard. That is, sophistication in the computer world is related to difficulty: thus, typesetting documents with TeX is considered sophisticated while using Microsoft Word is not--even if the resulting document looks more or less the same. But now that MacOS X is based on Unix and now gives users the ability to replace Finder with Terminal (for example), people look to the Macintosh as "finally" being a sophisticated operating system.
When I first got out of college in '88, the big thing was computer graphics. We had just got off a gaming high (where the money was in computer games), and computer graphics were starting to be the "next" big thing. (You couldn't throw a rock at a computer convention without hitting a computer graphics, computer visualization, or computer animation CEO in the head.)
Then the market crashed in around '91. Games started making a comeback around '92 or so; things started heating up shortly thereafter with Doom and it's clones showing a new dimension (pardon the pun) in gaming.
The game market collapsed around 96 or so, just about the time the web started taking off.
I've noticed about a 5 year cycle on these things: for about two to three years you can make a hell of a lot of money if you are in the right place at the right time (I was, in 95, in children's games--bought a house), but you can starve as the market readjusts and tries to find the "next big thing."
My advise: recognize the market is cyclical, with about a 5 year period. Presume that you will have two very dry years. (I did; most of the money I made on the child's game went into savings which paid the bills in the next two years when I didn't make squat.) If you are making $60K/year, pretend your budget is $45K/year and save the other $8K (after taxes) in a secure investment for the year when you will only make $30K. (Hell, I went in one year from $250K/year to $50K/year just fine with this philosophy.)
And keep your eyes out for the next big thing, so you can get on the roller coaster ride and stash some more money.
Or, go work for the government where paycuts and the like literally take an act of congress...
Is the RIAA on drugs, or do they realize that one of their biggest targets, those under the age of 18, are legally not able to be bound to a contract, license or other legal instrument?
Keep this up and they may as well force their resellers to prohibit the sale of music CDs to minors. Boy, wil that help their bottom line! (NOT)
So it'd be a high-end product for cats. But I know quite a few cat owners who would be estatic to be able to fork out a few hundred bucks for a cat door which would unlock only for their cat, and only if their cat wasn't bringing in any "presents."
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly disagree with the author's comment about saving documents, but not for the reason that most people think.
The problem with eliminating save and only having one version (the version that is currently open, which is reflected in the file on the disk) is that you eliminate a primitive sort of "versioning" where the saved document on disk represents an older version of the document. The "save" command becomes a sort of "push current version out" and "revert" becomes a sort of "roll back changes to last version."
Now I would happily eliminate the "save" menu from my programs, but only if we could replace it with a "mark version" and "rollback version" command which would allow me to maintain several versions of the same document. That is, I wouldn't mind if we created a word processor which saved the current version of the document to disk as it was typed, but only if I have the power to mark different document versions and either roll back to an older version or mark the contents as the current version in that file.
I strongly believe this is the reason why eliminating the "save" command was not accepted by MacOS usability testing when they were working on OpenDoc. OpenDoc eliminated file saving entirely, and users hated it--because users were using the "save" command and "revert" command as a sort of "commit changes/rollback changes" command--that is, as a primitive way of version control. And OpenDoc, by eliminating the save command, took that away from users.
Don't take away file version control; give me a more powerful version of it!
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
A "public good" is not something which every stinking last citizen of that country needs, wants or uses. Libraries are also a public good dispite the fact that they are only useful to people who can read, who are able to travel there, and who want to use them.
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one. In the same way, mass transit is a "public good" dispite the fact that the only people who can use mass transit are people who live near the stations. (Meaning the Federal dollars subsidizing the Amtrak raillines in New York--something which my tax dollars help to support--are unusable to me as I live in California.)
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
There has been a tremendous amount of research done into creating civic projects which minimize the need for transportation, or attempt to create transportation corridors which allow the use of mass transit in a more efficient manner.
The problem is twofold. First, there are a lot of people, and by and large most of them don't want to live in a cramped little apartment building in a 200 floor skyrise for the sake of minimizing the horizontal distance they need to travel to work. Most people would rather live in houses and housing developments--and unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, when you get more than a few thousand houses together, you have a transportation problem that cannot be easily solved by busing or rail.
Second, when you get more than a few thousand people in the same town, the combinatorial problem of N people (where N is large--such as Los Angeles, where you're pushing tens of millions), and M places they need to go (such as work, grocery store, etc), and you have a severe transportation problem. Los Angeles is trying to fight the problem by creating time and economic incentives for people to move to transportation hubs--that is, they're trying to fight the problem by severely re-engineering the way people live in Los Angeles. But as I said before, people don't want to live in high rises, they want to live in houses--to the point where they'd rather spend three hours a day in a car to go to work every day so they can have their house.
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
Actually, even in the most severe places, you can arrive by when you want if you just pay attention to the traffic reports and leave early enough. While "I'm sorry I'm late; bad traffic" is occassionally true, more often than not it's the grown up version of "my dog ate my homework."
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
People's transportation uses tend to break down into three categories. There are personal errands (groceries, shopping), work, and recreational (going out to see a movie, etc.)
Do not confuse them just to make a hairbrained point. If you are not buying your daily personal errand products and services locally, what are you thinking? Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
And work is work--for the most part, businesses are required to provide sufficient parking for their employees, so if you are having a hard time finding a place to park at work, you should takl to your employers, not just assume that there is some sort of conspiracy to make your life difficult. (Life *is* difficult, it doesn't need a conspiracy.)
It's only the recreational areas where there is a problem with parking. But in general that's because most recreational areas (such as parks, movie theaters, etc) generally are not built with sufficient parking for peak usage, because it winds up being inefficient from a cost analysis standpoint. (Why build a four floor parking garage if 95% of the time, you will never use three of those floors?)
And in that case, there really is no good solution--except perhaps not going out to see a movie during peak times.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.
No it does not. Mass transportation of products is only efficient when you have a lot of product going from point A to point B. In fact, most of the United State's logistical infrastructure is now organized around that fact. That's why when you send a FedEx package to the next city over, it generally is flown into Memphis--because centralization of transportation corridors is more efficient than solving the O(N**2) problem of moving products directly to their destination.
But once you get to an endpoint--such as the Port of Los Angeles, or the Ralphs Grocery Distribution Hub in Los Angeles, or whatever other central hub that is serviced by rail--you now must rely on surface street traffic and trucks, not mass transit or public transportation--to move the product to the end store.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread.
I don't believe so.
The automobile solved two problems--which accounted for it's massive initial acceptance and for public pressure to create better roads. (Roads significanly predated cars by a few thousand years, by the way--even paved roads with lined beds were built by the Romans.)
The first problem cars solved was the expense and general hassle of owning a horse. Descriptions of the streets of New York's horse maneur problem, especially during the summer, is rather shocking. New York spent a significant amount of resources just cleaning horse droppings on a daily basis, and the illnesses that arose from horse droppings, as well as the stench was shocking. And while we are now (and rightfully so) concerned with the public health problems of car pollution, horse pollution was a real and rather terrible problem.
The second problem cars solved was that cars were more reliable and required less maintanance than horses. You didn't need to provide a stable and hay, or extra space. And that, along with Henry Ford's pricing efforts to bring the price of mass produced cars down to a reasonable level, allowed private individuals for the first time access at any form of private transportation whatsoever.
But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
The most "economically efficient" way for people to live is in massive studio apartment highrises clustered in tight little clusters around mass transportation corridors.
But, with the exception of Manhattan, people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high. They would rather live in their own house on a 1/4 acre lot in the suburbs--and once you start taking people's desires for space and elbow room into account, transportation goes from being a relatively simple exercise of moving people around from a small number of hubs to an O(n**2) problem of figuring out how to allow a person to efficiently go from just about anywhere in a several hundred square mile area to just about anywhere else in a several hundred square mile area.
And that's hard.
People do not want to live in an "economically efficient manner"--taken to the extreme, that would mean that people would wear all the same clothing and eat algae-based paste that wouldn't need to be moved in refrigerated trucks to the grocery store. Instead, people have certain desires (such as a nice house in the suburbs on a quiet street, or unique furnature and decorations, or to go to a movie and a quaint little restaurant in the next town) which makes transportation issues a royal pain in the ass.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno. But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient--that's absurd. And backwards: the question is not what is the most economically efficient solution, but what is the most economically efficient way to give people what they want--including that house in the suburbs which makes transportation by anything other than some form of powered motorized vehicle impractical.
Translation: they sent questionares to 50 reporters in different countries asking how things were in their own country, and tallied the response.
The problem with this is that it's doesn't rank things like hard statistics, but ranks how people perceive their own freedoms in their own country. A country like the United States, which tends to be very self-critical over relatively minor infractions of personal liberty (such as the arrest of a dumb reporter who decides to test the airport security check-in with a real gun) is bound to rank lower than a country like Costa Rica (where reporters are probably happy that they are no longer being arrested and subject to torture for "insulting politicians.")
While this is an interesting web site and article, and a great source of inspiration for heated debates around the water cooler, I would take the overall ranking with a huge mound of salt.
And notice the bias, as well:
In the context provided, this implies that journalists are regularly murdered in the United States. And, by ranking a country that just 8 months ago stopped giving prison sentences to those found guilty of "insulting" public officials, it implies (by having a higher ranking than the United States) that U.S. reporters are regularly jailed for "insulting" public officials.
I'm not saying this bias is intentional. But the sodium levels in my blood have reached critical.
The public in the US is mainly educated in political matters by the press, especially cable media. Alternatives to the cable giants, ala BBC are not readily available. The cable media are owned by mega-corporations. It's no surprise that these corporations are interested in preserving their power through economic and political means.
Regardless if this is true or not, the reasons cited on the web site for the relative low score of the United States was not increasing megacorporate control of the press, but the arrest of reporters for violating clearly marked security zones and jailing reporters who had knowledge of a crime but who refused to divulge his information in the name of the "freedom of the press."
So increasing megacorporate control of the press was not a factor here.
OH, MY, GOD!
.wav file that got integrated into the Kitchen product. At one point, the 'Fridge says "Eeeek! A cockroach!."
As the principle software developer on Someone's in the Kitchen (the title helped pay the down payment on my house), I have to say I didn't realize this problem had made it to the published Microsoft Knowledge Base. Of all things...
Though I have to admit, the funniest bug report I ever tracked for that product was a timing error in a
Problem was, the wave file was cut short, and the play back of the audio stopped before the syllable "roach."
Needless to say fixing that problem before GM was slightly more important than the Blendolini Choco-Shake hang.
Okay, it sounds like what you really need to do is implement weekly status meetings, where at a particular time and place every week, everyone gets together and shares what's going on. The meeting doesn't need to be very formal, and trust me: doughnuts can help keep people in a good mood, and don't cost a lot.
But at each meeting you should have everyone go around the table and describe what they've worked on that week. Describe where they are in the code, how they're doing, any difficulties that have arisen. The meeting should never be judgemental; instead if someone is taking longer than expected, see if others can offer solutions or help. The whole theme should be group coherency; no-one is an island and no-one gets left behind or allowed to sink.
If you do have these meetings, it may be best to place them on a Thursday; that way people are motivated Tuesdays and Wednesdays to do something so they have something to show. And that way, they feel like they can have some breathing room Monday and some time Friday to either catch up or slack off, depending where they are in the project.
But always have them; insist everyone is there, and insist everyone share where they are. The meeting itself, if handled weekly for a small group of people should take no more than half an hour, so there is no excuse for the thing sucking down an entire day. And for God's sake, no presentations! Just an informal chat with the entire team there over doughnuts to discuss progress on the project.
So that leaves carving up the day into different parts or carving up the year into different parts. The French tried to go with a decimal month system after the French Revolution but it never caught on.
One major reason why the French Revolutionary Calendar never caught on for a couple of reasons, all revolving around the 10-day week. The principle problem was that it contained only one day off every 10 days, instead of 1 day off every 7. Aside from the Biblical implications (God made the Earth in 6 days, not 9, and a religious population isn't about to alter a fundamental aspect of their faith just to suit political reality), no-one wanted to have to work an extra three days before getting one off!
Oddly enough, the French Revolutionary Calendar was advocated as superior precisely because it contained fewer days off--which would be "good for the hard-working people." (Undoubtedly something advocated by a non-working aristocracy... *grin*)
One thing I forgot...so I'll say it here. If you plan well, and have good drawings, you can get a contractor to give you a fixed price for the whole job. If the price of materials goes up, the GC eats those costs.
If you, as an owner-builder, aren't getting fixed-price contracts from your subcontractors, you are a fool. Likewise--if you are a general contractor (a building contractor here in California) and you aren't getting fixed-price contracts from your own subs, you are a fool.
"Cost Plus" is sort of like trying to sell software through a publisher for a percentage of "net profit": the final reported costs can be so cooked as to rob you of any money you may have otherwise thought you'd get.
Of course, by going cost plus my contractor charged me a fixed fee (turned out to be about 7% of the construction cost), and I got his carpentry/labor crew of four for $55/hr plus all his regular subs - and they were all top notch.
I will bet you cash that he was not paying his carpentry/labor crew $55/hour. Around here in California, the framers don't get $55/hour, but a bit less. I'll bet you that he was padding the rate to $55/hour by claiming a kickback from the carpentry crew for "management overhead" or some such fool thing--that is, he was paying *himself* $55/hour, then using that pool to then pay off the carpentry/labor crew, and pocketing the rest.
Which goes to illustrate something else: if you think the building industry is an honest, above board industry when it comes to money, you're a fool: I have yet to meet a single contractor or subcontractor who wouldn't sell his own mother into slavery for a buck--which is one of the reasons why as an owner-builder you absolutely must watch the subcontractors like a hawk, learn how houses are supposed to go together so they don't cut corners, and make damned sure you watch the budget. Fixed-price contracts from your subs (who will moan and groan that it's not standard practice--bullshit, it is) is one way to watch your bottom line.
Well, here in Southern California, the term "McMansion" refers to those really large houses on really small lots you see littering the hillsides around here. Those houses are generally built by figuring out the maximum cubic feet allowed (by taking the setbacks and figuring out the buildable area, and the maximum allowed height of the building), and building the largest thing that will fit in that volume.
They're out of style in large part because they're ugly eyesores. The worse example of a "McMansion" I ever saw was some guy's 10,000 sqft monstrosity which was basically a cube which exactly fit in the setback and height requirements, and contained an indoor pool. The thing was a wonder to behold from the inside; from the outside it was a very large box--the ugliest possible building one could build in a residential neighborhood.
Smaller, well styled homes are in vogue here in California (which means they'll be in vogue in about 10 years throughout the rest of the country) in large part because they make better use of the lot space, and because they are more "creative" than a volume filling cube. Further, creating small outdoor spaces around the house (as sort of "entertaining rooms" surrounded by bushes and overhangs and foutains) is also in vogue--but that's probably something that won't translate well to, say, Montana.)
His subs, to whom he supplies work on a regular basis, will get to his job before yours - even if you called them first.
That's why you need to shop around for subcontractors before employing them--some subcontractors are flakier than others. Further, this sort of thing depends on the region where you are: some regions are more overbuilt than others, and some regions are more likely to have a few building firms who monopolize the subs.
Oh, one more thing. That lot you just paid $45,000 to buy? The buider paid $5,000 or less because he bought ten acres and cut it up into 10 lots.
I don't know how things are done in your state, but in the State of California, a land developer (the guy who buys land and breaks it up into smaller parcels for development) is as often as not a different animal than the building contractor, at least for custom homes. The only fellows I know who are buying large acrage and building their own houses are tract home developers. And while it's true that, as often as not, the building contractor may be getting a better price on the land from his developer buddy, the price difference (at least in California) is really not that significant towards the overall cost of the home.
Most people I know of who have lost their shirts building their own homes screwed up because they didn't watch their subs like hawks (as you point out), and because they blow their budget in modifications to the house made after construction already started.
My parents are architectual drafters. (They're the ones you would go to for house plans and engineering if you were to build your own house.) I've watched while I was growing up several people try to build their own houses. And while many save a lot of money, an equal number of people get into serious financial problems really quick.
By the way, I bought a house rather than building my own, dispite being in a family who is in the construction business. Partly I did so because building your own house is a serious time commitment (you don't think that $20-80K savings comes for free, do you?), and partly because where I live (Los Angeles), the only available buildable lots are located tens of miles away from where I live. (The closest lots I could find in my price range were located about 30 miles from the Glendale/Pasadena/Burbank area where I worked--while the house I live in is in Glendale--I can see the downtown skyline from my front yard.)
Anyways, the two most common mistakes that I've seen are (a) overbuilding what you can afford, and (b) not settling on a design before beginning the construction process.
In the first problem, many people who try to build their own house try to "overbuild"; that is, they try to build a much bigger house than they really can afford. It's not that they can't afford the shell of the house; they just can't afford to put stuff in it, and plant the lawn, and pay for the cooling costs and everything else associated with house ownership. Sure, perhaps at $70/sqft you can afford to build a 4,000 sqft house--but all those rooms are going to look rather stupid if you don't have any money left over to buy furnature. Likewise, if you are paying all your money into making the strokes on your house loan, how are you going to pay for electricity, water, gas, sewar?
My parent's advise is to always build smaller than the biggest thing you can afford. Instead of building a 4,000 sqft house which maxes out your monthly budget (and omits property taxes, utilities, that extra T-1 line from the equation), build a 3,000 sqft house but then decorate it nicely.
Keep in mind that "McMansions" are no longer in style, by the way, but smaller (but cuter) "bungalo" houses are all the vogue nowadays. Your profits after reselling your house will be higher, and your enjoyment of your house will be greater, if you build under what you can afford, so you can live in your house comfortably.
The second mistake many people make, which eat up that $100K promised savings faster than an OC3 connection, is not to plan every detail of their house before pour the foundation. Meaning they will often decide, after the foundation is poured, that perhaps they really want a 9 ft. plate line instead of an 8 ft for higher ceilings, or maybe that downstairs bathroom should be moved over two feet so they can have a bigger closet. Granted, each change doesn't seem like it should cost that much, and often you think of things that didn't come to you in the planning phase that you really wished you had. But take it from someone who has seen a couple of folks driven to bankrupcy (literally!): creeping featurism in the house can suck your wallet dry.
Part of the problem is that a house is a complete system: each change you make can have consequences farther down the line which you didn't account for. For example, making the ceiling taller may only take an extra few thousand in framing costs--but it can have consequences on the plumbing of the second story, or the exterior windows, or the amount of siding you need: in short, that one change can seriously affect your budget in other areas in unexpected ways.
Further, unless you plan right down to the fixtures from day one, you may find yourself doing stupid things like throwing in the $800 sink instead of the planned $80 sink in the bathroom, or upgrading the kitchen cabinets, without realizing these things can quickly eat an additional $30K real fast. (When I redid the bathroom in our house, we upgraded the fixtures and cabinets. The price difference in that one upgrade (four prefab cabinets, two sinks, one toilet and one bathtub) was around $5K--for one 7x9 bathroom! We did it knowing the price, but some people just start writing checks without keeping track of their budget, and quickly blow their budget out of the water.)
Oh, and on finding the right subcontractors: I would seriously talk to the archetectual drafter or designer in your area for references. You'd be supprised the number of contractors out there who simply don't bother to show up at the job site, or who flake out, or who are completely incompetant.
And my other advise: learn how the framing schedule and the standard framing details work, as well as how siding should be applied and how wallboard should go up. (Pick up a book at your local "do it yourself" hardware store such as Home Depot.) You'd be supprised at the number of guys out there who will cut corners and use structurally unsound framing or construction techniques in order to cut corners or to use hardware he happens to have in the truck rather than going out to buy the correct fastener or the proper nails.
Just my two cents worth.
While I agree with most of your comments, just one point from another ol' timer. (Though only 15 years...):
Teach that it might be easier to use 'i' as a variable in a short loop, but loop-idx or object_idx make more sense.
Research suggests that, for complex equations and/or complex operations, shorter variable names are more easily recognized than longer variable names. That's because most people who learned algaebra recognize patterns in the equations, and using longer variable names makes the equations harder to recognize.
Thus, "force = gravitational_constant * object_1_mass * object_2_mass / (distance * distance)" takes a little more time for the brain to parse than "f = G*m1*m2/(r*r)", even though they represent the same thing.
With this in mind, I would suggest that if the iterator of a loop was being used as part of a mathematical operation (such as an array index), perhaps using 'i' will make the code more readable. However, if your iterator is not being used as part of a complex equation or represents an object (such as a pointer in a linked list), perhaps using a descriptive name makes more sense.
Personally I tend to write:
for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i) a[i] = 0;
yet:
for (windowPtr = GWindowList; windowPtr != NULL; windowPtr = windowPtr->next) {
windowPtr->Update();
}
You get the idea.
Just my two cents worth.
Snack of the month club from The Popcorn Factory. (http://www.thepopcornfactory.com).
It's great; a new snack each month delivered to your door. I'm sure she'd get a kick out of monthly snacks...
But, the history of the human race, indeed of our own civilization, doesn't bear it out. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ulysees, Shakespear, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and other artists too numerous to mention had all the incentive they needed to create the greatest works our civilization has ever known, all without the existence of copyright or any other form of "intellectual property."
So where does one find a sponsor for one's works? I would *love* to write software for the King of the United States of America, but as we don't have Kings, I'm not sure where to turn.
The rational: creators should be granted a limited right to exclusivity of the use of their works automatically. However, in order to keep the copyright for longer than 15 years, the author (or owner) must proactively maintain and renew that copyright. This will allow large corporations (such as Disney) with an intellectual property portfolio they wish to keep to continue keeping that portfolio as long as they wish, but which allows the other 98% of works which are no longer really cared for to fall into the public domain after a reasonable period of time.
Patents Patents must be for material products or for items which cause a material change. In particular, patents cannot be extended to business techniques, mathematical formulas, or computer software. Further, patents live for 7 years, and can be extended once, by the legitimate patent holder, for an additional 7 year period, only if that patent holder can demonstrate he is actually using the patent.
Further, filing a patent with intent to deceive (by, for example, claiming a business technique patent by claiming the business technique when applied to a material product is a "material object") should be a fealony. Any person or corporation which is convicted of such fealony may lose the right to either file deceptive patents in the future, or may forfit their current patent portfolio into the public domain.
Same with copyrights: filing an "improper" copyright intentiionally with intent to deceive should be a fealony, and can cause someone who abuses this system to lose the right to renew their copyright portfolio.
Further, I would extend the right to "crack the corporate veil" to this, meaning that, in the event someone violates the law and loses the right to renew a copyright also means he does not have the right to circumvent this by incorporation.
If the RIAA or the MPAA intend to put teeth into the proposed punishments for violating "piracy", then we should also put teeth into proposed punishments for abusing the IP laws by corporations as well.
I believe, and it's been a long time since I had to care about his, that driving "faster than the posted speed limit" is in and of itself a violation - the common "speeding ticket". This is why you can get ticked for going 60 in a 55 on a clear, dry day with perfect visibililty and no traffic on the road - in other words, perfectly safe under the conditions.
It turns out in California that you in fact *are* permitted to drive above the posted speed limit, if you can demonstrate that the day was nice and clear, or that there was little traffic. The purpose of this exception, by the way, is to undermine the ability of local municipalities to set up "speed traps", where they set a short stretch of road 10 MPH under the rest of the throughway.
(This is also why a municipality in California can only enforce speed limit laws using radar guns on stretches of road which have had a 'speed survey', and set the speed limits accordingly. For those who don't know, a 'speed survey' is a survey where you measure the speed of every car going past a particular point for a period of time, and set the speed limit so that at least 85% of the cars measured during your test period are under that speed.)
The city where I live, Glendale, just got it's legal ass handed to it by a judge who said that the posted speed limits in Glendale were set too low, and advised my city to either update the speed limits, or lose the right to enforce speed limits within the city boundaries. (The evidence showed that Glendale set the speed limits lower than traffic engineers suggested or the speed surveys showed, in large part because of political pressure.)
But then, this is the law in California. Your milege may vary. (Pardon the pun.)
I own a ReplayTV with commercial skip. Yet I leave commercial skip off and use the '30-second' skip feature instead.
If an ad catches my eye, I'm more likely to back up, watch the entire ad, then move on. The fact that I can skip advertising for products I'm not interested in (such as for beer, which I don't drink), but watch ads for stuff I am interested in (the latest movies, for example, computers, and cars, as well as local ads for local shops and services) is one of the things I like about my ReplayTV.
If it weren't for an ad for a local store in Glendale where I live (Legacy Furnature), we would have never found the perfect wall-unit, shelves for our guest bedroom, and a few other items. They make the cutest gothic-style pine furnature, and are about the only local furnature company where I live which does so--saving us a trip clear out to Hollywood. But I digress.
Perhaps I'm odd, but if I could just screen ads I'm not interested in and play those I am interested in, I'd be a happy camper. How about a feature which allows me to vote on ads to indicate if I want to watch ads like it or not? I know--it would require a lot of infrastructure (such as a uniform method for marking what kind of ad is playing, and a mechanism for storing my ad watching preferences), but the feedback would tell people exactly what sort of consumer I am.
I would even happily give people my demographic information (linking my ad preferences to identifying information for direct mail ads) if I thought it would influence the sort of advertising information they sent me (and, more importantly, did *not* send me). That's because the biggest problem I face as a consumer is finding crap I want, movies that I can stand, and services that make me happy.
For me, it's not a question of whether PVRs which skip ads should be allowed. It's more a question of whether ads themselves should be allowed. The whole point of advertising is to increase desire for things you don't have, and are often better off without.
Actually, advertising serves three purposes. The first is to drive desire. The second is to give out information--for example, to give out information about upcoming movies or items which you may want but wouldn't have known about before. The third is to validate ownership of those things you already have: the Apple iMac ad, for example, validates those who just bought an iMac by reminding them how cool that gadget was.
It's rather funny, but consumer validation, especially for big ticket items such as for purchasing a car or a computer is a very important part about advertising. (It's something which ads from Gateway seem to miss, as their ads tend to be more 'functional', describing price/performance points, rather than 'pleasing', describing how cool Gateway computers are.) And consumer validation is also very important for on-going services, such as for cellular service or for internet services.
Stuck between 10 minutes of inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you are subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted manipulation inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Then don't watch.
I know a couple of people who don't even *own* television sets, who are otherwise happy and well-adjusted people. It's not like they force a television set into your room to be always on, a'la 1984...
You can't say "I shut my eyes everytime I drove past a speed limit sign" and expect a judge to let you off the hook for going 120.
You can't do that in California because the posted speed limit is legally considered an "advisory" sign. The actual speed limit in California for all roads is whatever speed is considered "safe" and "reasonable" for that particular area. (It's also why you could be doing 40 miles an hour in a 45 mph zone and still get a speeding ticket if conditions warrant--such as in heavy fog.)
EULAs are for all intents and purposes contracts which you agree to by clicking the "I Agree" button (or whatever); unfortunately for those who support EULAs, there are some restrictions on contractual enforcement, such as the notion of a "contract of coersion", where you are coerced to agree with a contract (such as the condition you are describing), and the problem of contract enforcability with contracts made with minors.
Speed limit signs, however, are not contracts. You don't agree to obey speed limit signs by the act of driving.
Being one of the "old guard" (I've been using Macs since 1984, and writing software for them since 1985), and being a Windows programmer since Windows 2.11(386), I can tell you for a fact that while PC users generally don't care about Mac users, if you had a Mac in your office, you were almost guarenteed to get a deriding comment from the PC user without any provocation whatsoever.
I never did understand that. That is, when I worked at JPL I had a Mac and a PC sitting on my desk. Inevitably when a PC-only person would walk into my cube, he would immediately comment on the "paperweight", or how overexpensive the Mac was, or how the WIMP interface was for wimps.
Generally, when comments started flying back and forth in person, it always started with a co-worker making a negative comment about the Macintosh--not because the Mac user went on the attack. And while it was never a big comment, after an entire day of "why do you use that paperweight" or "I thought you were a power-user until I saw your Macintosh" or whatever, it was hard not to snipe back.
I had a theory about that sniping from the PC folks, by the way: there is a certain expectation that using computers should be hard. That is, sophistication in the computer world is related to difficulty: thus, typesetting documents with TeX is considered sophisticated while using Microsoft Word is not--even if the resulting document looks more or less the same. But now that MacOS X is based on Unix and now gives users the ability to replace Finder with Terminal (for example), people look to the Macintosh as "finally" being a sophisticated operating system.
Well, the world has always been divided into those who believe the world can be divided into two groups, and those who do not.
As you do not believe the world can be divided into two groups, you're one of *them*.
Be gone from my sight, foul demon!
When I first got out of college in '88, the big thing was computer graphics. We had just got off a gaming high (where the money was in computer games), and computer graphics were starting to be the "next" big thing. (You couldn't throw a rock at a computer convention without hitting a computer graphics, computer visualization, or computer animation CEO in the head.)
Then the market crashed in around '91. Games started making a comeback around '92 or so; things started heating up shortly thereafter with Doom and it's clones showing a new dimension (pardon the pun) in gaming.
The game market collapsed around 96 or so, just about the time the web started taking off.
I've noticed about a 5 year cycle on these things: for about two to three years you can make a hell of a lot of money if you are in the right place at the right time (I was, in 95, in children's games--bought a house), but you can starve as the market readjusts and tries to find the "next big thing."
My advise: recognize the market is cyclical, with about a 5 year period. Presume that you will have two very dry years. (I did; most of the money I made on the child's game went into savings which paid the bills in the next two years when I didn't make squat.) If you are making $60K/year, pretend your budget is $45K/year and save the other $8K (after taxes) in a secure investment for the year when you will only make $30K. (Hell, I went in one year from $250K/year to $50K/year just fine with this philosophy.)
And keep your eyes out for the next big thing, so you can get on the roller coaster ride and stash some more money.
Or, go work for the government where paycuts and the like literally take an act of congress...
Is the RIAA on drugs, or do they realize that one of their biggest targets, those under the age of 18, are legally not able to be bound to a contract, license or other legal instrument?
Keep this up and they may as well force their resellers to prohibit the sale of music CDs to minors. Boy, wil that help their bottom line! (NOT)
So it'd be a high-end product for cats. But I know quite a few cat owners who would be estatic to be able to fork out a few hundred bucks for a cat door which would unlock only for their cat, and only if their cat wasn't bringing in any "presents."
LOL! And me without any moderating points today...