I can't sit still for more than 15 minutes at a time and work. Due to my depression, I find it hard to concentrate and remember things and I get nervous. I can write code, but it takes me a long time. As a result, I am currently on disability. I still try to keep my skills up to date at home working on small projects, but I still find it hard to work.
What helps me is music, if I play music I like, I can relax and not be so nervous. Which means a MP3 Player, an audio CD, or a radio next to the PC. Now this won't work in a cubical environment unless you wear headphones, if they allow them.
The main problem is that most investors are not savvy enough to understand that Open Source does not mean no-cost software, it is free as in speach not as in free beer. Many Open Sourced based companies make their money by charging for a tech support contract like Red Hat, MySQL, and others do. Red Hat also sells their CD-ROMs and Manuals for money in retail stores. There is money to be made with Open Source, but not every investor can see that.
The question then, is how much money can be made? In that case, you'd better have a good business plan that runs the numbers on how you charge the customer and where every dollar goes. Like say $35 for a CD-ROM pressed with the latest software and a small user manual. $10 of that goes to employee salaries, $10 goes to paying off bills and other expenses, and $10 goes to tech support issues, and $5 is profit that can be shared by the investors. So you would make a profit of $5 a sale based on this example. If you charged extra for tech support, you could cut out that other $10 and move it to profits, or savings.
My past two jobs required quick and dirty programming. Start coding on day one, or get written up. Any analysis and design is rejected and programs got written by the seat of our pants. They wanted complete life cycle in days or weeks, not months, and that included QA testing.
I consider this "Fast Food" programming, fast development but harmful and full of flaws.
PHBs and managers only seem to watch the time it takes to write a program and not the quality of the program. Anyone who takes the time to do any analysis and design and write flow charts and object charts get terminated or put on probation until they can do things the way we were not taught in college.
I was a "Legacy App Developer" two jobs ago in a law firm that let 30 IT people go in four years out of an IT staff of 35. Being in the "legacy" group, meant that I got the programs that ex-coworkers had worked on and that were incomplete, undocumented, missing flowcharts and other design documentation, and full of more bugs than an Ant Farm or a Microsoft Beta Operating System. I had to work with spaghetti code, it was VB so it contained a lot of GOTOs, they didn't follow our naming convention and used i, x, y, z, s, c, and other short names which I had to rename to make more sense. All in all, working with this code to put it up to standards took longer than I thought. But I made it more reliable, faster, and documented my work as I went on looking at it. As a result, the managers took a look at it and saw that thanks to my changes now anyone could work on the code, and since programmers are a dime a dozen now they could fire me and then hire someone for a fraction of my cost to work on them. Last I checked they fired my replacement and are looking to hire someone else. He took over a year trying to convert all the ASP and VB apps to Dotnet and couldn't.
But anyway if we don't do quick and dirty programming, they will outsource it to people in other countries either by H1B Visa workers, or out of country sweatshops.
not lost if you know where to look. Spend some time with the Amish, you'll learn everything except how to make beer as they don't drink do they? Either that or plan a trip to "Silver Dollar City" near Branson, Missouri.
Most of those things are good to do as a hobby, and you can make most of that stuff cheaper than buying it. I think that we need to keep that knowledge in case something happens to the world and we need to start over again. Also it is good to see how things used to be done.
they want quick and sloppy instead of slow and reliable code. It is the "Fast Food" mindset that creates unreliable software. Managers don't want programmers to take their time and do it right, they want results as fast as possible. So programmers don't get the chance to make sure that memory used is unallocated once unsed and they forgot to close out recordsets and files once they are finished with them.
I was let go from my past two jobs because I wasn't quick enough. But my programs ran reliably, and didn't have as many Help Desk calls.
What the managers want is "Good Enough" code, as in good enough to work and do what they want. They don't care if it crashes the system several times a day or more, as long as they can ship it to the customer.
A cool game, it definately needed a Windows and Linux port done. The DOS version was a bit buggy even with the patches applied. But fun. Sometimes I had to load from an older save file after the current game locked up the machine I was running it on. Usually this happened in combat with the really powerful magical creatures.
But then it was Civilization based, wasn't it?
If you loved Master of magic, you might love Age Of Magic when it is released. It is FreeCiv based. FreeCiv is an open sourced version of Civilization.
Orion, there are some things your future self wants you to know. From 2003 to 1980.
#1 Learn all you can about computers. I know you are doing this, but once IBM comes out with a computer, learn what you can about it. Look at a company named Microsoft, consider investing in it and sell by the year 1999 no matter what happens.
#2 When you go into the adolecent mental ward, don't be afraid to show your feelings towards Tawnie. When she goes back to Morris or tries to, tell her that you love her and see how that goes. This should come up in about 1982.
#3 Avoid eating snacks when you can, eat more vegtables and fruit, that way I can avoid having the weight problem that I have.
#4 Always go to church, usually the 11 am mass, you will meet your future wife there. Exchange phone numbers, take it slow, things will work out as they worked out for me.
#5 Try not to get so worried or upset, you'll just end up back in the hospital again. Keep taking your medicine and don't miss any appointments with the doctor.
#6 In 1985 you will meet some new friends in a new high school, take the deseg program that will take you into the city. One of your friends is named Mike, keep in contact with him. Whatever you do, don't leave him alone on May 31, 1999, get friends to help if possible. If he has a shotgun, take it away from him. Keep the alchahol away from him too.
#7 Tell your grandfather you were named after to get his postrate checked, he has cancer. If he takes too long, they won't be able to save him. Tell your other grandfather that you love him, and you want him to excercise more. He has a weak heart and will die in 1983 unless something is done. In my time, both my grandfathers died, one after the other.
#8 Don't go to Rolla, go to the Community College first, get an associates degree, and then go to Rolla or UMSL. Study hard, no parties, you can socialize, but sdon't get into heavy drinking. That will be your downfall if you get into drinking. Once I gave that up, life was a lot better.
#9 Exercise when you can, do a few pushups, or situps. Use your brother's weight bench. Do this at least for 15 minutes a day. You should get into better shape.
#10 Whatever you do, don't panic. Keep a level head and think about things before you do them. Each discusion you make will effect the outcome of your life.
didn't Next made an "OpenStep" that they shared with HP and Sun and others? Whatever happened to it? Hello?
Why doesn't Apple just made Aqua a KDE or GNOME type of program that loads over X-Windows in Linux, OpenBSD and others? Add in a Carbon library and more, and then that GCC compiler to make OSX binaries, and there you have it!
Because companies that do make free games tend not to stay in business for very long. There was one company that cloned Pacman, Centiped, Donkey Kong, and others and had a free DOS version and an enhanced version with more levels and an editor for like $30USD each. It was called Champgames or something. It sank faster than the Titanic when the makers of the video games they tried to clone came back and sued them. Nicely done DOS based games, no Windows or Mac or Linux ports that I knew of. Plus when MAME came out, nobody was interested in playing them when they could play the real thing for almost nothing anyway.
Abandonware sites have some of the classic games for download, but get shut down real quick as soon as they get popular.
You might be able to find some from Gnutella clients; however, that is being cleaned out as well. Better hurry.
how else is she going to marry a guy who admitted to slaughtering a bunch of Sand-Children and talks about a Dictatorship being a cool idea? Like many women, she is attracted to jerks. This jerk, apparently, becomes Darth Vader later on.
Because most PC Users do not have a need to emulate Mac stuff on their PC. It usually is the other way around, some DOS or Windows program that a Mac User cannot do without forces them to by PC Emulation software.
So really there isn't any money to be made in making a Mac emulator for the PC, no market, no money, so why do it? The main part is emulating the PowerPC processors, nobody to my knowledge has done that yet, but the 68K processors they have. So we have 68K Mac emulators, but they don't do much business.
like IBM for example, sure they support Linux but how many of their "Lotus" applications did they port to Linux? Big money setting up servers for businesses, but apparently not selling them the software that runs on Windows only platforms, but has been ported to Linux?
Just get it easier to use and configure and maybe it will start to do better. Nothing like doing a Red Hat 7.3 install only to have something fail on the X Server software. There ought to be an easy way to recover from that. Once Linux gets it, then it might start selling more copies.
More than bad management, bad marketing as well. Also they had "Commodore" as a parent company and it gave the Amiga company a bad rep. Many thought that the Amiga was nothing but a new C64 or C128 with slow disk drives and nothing for it but a bunch of games.
If Apple, IBM, HP, or one of the other companies that the Amiga company was offered to had bought it out, history would have unfolded differently.
Plus the Amiga did not keep up with the Mac and PC systems out there. Once they started getting 3D and Accelorated video cards in the early 1990's, the Amiga lost its advantage. Apple had to move to the PPC chips to get more power to compete with the WINTEL systems as the 68000 series had lost steam.
There also was a lack of developers and dealers for the Amiga after Commodore went belly up. Many thought that the Amiga was dead after that.
if someone wrote a Mac compatable ROM, Apple would sue them before they could make any decent money off of it.
The best bet would be to have college students disassemble a PowerMac G3/G4 ROM and write the interrupts and APIs that it supports and then have a second group design a ROM to those specs. Might as well release it to the open source, so that even if Apple sues, someone will have a copy of it out there.
I remember Adventure Contruction Set for the Amiga 1000. You designed the rooms, the items, and the characters and even did editing of the pixels for the graphics. It was cool, and it was a neat way to design games within the system and give them to your friends.
Before that it was a game called "Wizard" for the Commodore 64 that was a "Jumpman" clone but used Wizards and Magic items. You could create your own disks to make your own levels. It also was fun.
Say doesn't Civilization have a map editor?
Way back before that I recall a BASIC game called EMONS for the Apple// that was a D&D type game but in BASIC and you could create your own adventures. How far back does this stuff go anyway?
Bring back Romana and K9, they really made the show! Fix the chameleon curcuit. Have The Master steal a new body. Bring back Darvos and the Daleks. Send in the Cybermen. But most importantly, regenerate The Doctor, into another actor.
since AmigaOS can be run on almost any platform now. AmigaOS XL allows it to run on WINTEL systems, and they have AmigaDE players for Linux and Windows. Soon, I expect, they will have an OSX player? Shouldn't be too hard to make since they already have a Linux version.
With some changes, they can get AmigaOS 4.0 to boot on a Mac if they wanted to. Really quite a nice OS as well, much smoother running than MacOS 9.2 and OSX.
Since the Amiga transcends the Amiga hardware and is multi-platform, it is much more valuable and viable than MacOS or OSX anyway. So who cares?
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I can't sit still for more than 15 minutes at a time and work. Due to my depression, I find it hard to concentrate and remember things and I get nervous. I can write code, but it takes me a long time. As a result, I am currently on disability. I still try to keep my skills up to date at home working on small projects, but I still find it hard to work.
What helps me is music, if I play music I like, I can relax and not be so nervous. Which means a MP3 Player, an audio CD, or a radio next to the PC. Now this won't work in a cubical environment unless you wear headphones, if they allow them.
The main problem is that most investors are not savvy enough to understand that Open Source does not mean no-cost software, it is free as in speach not as in free beer. Many Open Sourced based companies make their money by charging for a tech support contract like Red Hat, MySQL, and others do. Red Hat also sells their CD-ROMs and Manuals for money in retail stores. There is money to be made with Open Source, but not every investor can see that.
The question then, is how much money can be made? In that case, you'd better have a good business plan that runs the numbers on how you charge the customer and where every dollar goes. Like say $35 for a CD-ROM pressed with the latest software and a small user manual. $10 of that goes to employee salaries, $10 goes to paying off bills and other expenses, and $10 goes to tech support issues, and $5 is profit that can be shared by the investors. So you would make a profit of $5 a sale based on this example. If you charged extra for tech support, you could cut out that other $10 and move it to profits, or savings.
My past two jobs required quick and dirty programming. Start coding on day one, or get written up. Any analysis and design is rejected and programs got written by the seat of our pants. They wanted complete life cycle in days or weeks, not months, and that included QA testing.
I consider this "Fast Food" programming, fast development but harmful and full of flaws.
PHBs and managers only seem to watch the time it takes to write a program and not the quality of the program. Anyone who takes the time to do any analysis and design and write flow charts and object charts get terminated or put on probation until they can do things the way we were not taught in college.
I was a "Legacy App Developer" two jobs ago in a law firm that let 30 IT people go in four years out of an IT staff of 35. Being in the "legacy" group, meant that I got the programs that ex-coworkers had worked on and that were incomplete, undocumented, missing flowcharts and other design documentation, and full of more bugs than an Ant Farm or a Microsoft Beta Operating System. I had to work with spaghetti code, it was VB so it contained a lot of GOTOs, they didn't follow our naming convention and used i, x, y, z, s, c, and other short names which I had to rename to make more sense. All in all, working with this code to put it up to standards took longer than I thought. But I made it more reliable, faster, and documented my work as I went on looking at it. As a result, the managers took a look at it and saw that thanks to my changes now anyone could work on the code, and since programmers are a dime a dozen now they could fire me and then hire someone for a fraction of my cost to work on them. Last I checked they fired my replacement and are looking to hire someone else. He took over a year trying to convert all the ASP and VB apps to Dotnet and couldn't.
But anyway if we don't do quick and dirty programming, they will outsource it to people in other countries either by H1B Visa workers, or out of country sweatshops.
Much better than IE, except it does not support ActiveX and VBScript. I get a much smoother surfing experience with Mozilla than I get with IE.
Most of those things are good to do as a hobby, and you can make most of that stuff cheaper than buying it. I think that we need to keep that knowledge in case something happens to the world and we need to start over again. Also it is good to see how things used to be done.
they want quick and sloppy instead of slow and reliable code. It is the "Fast Food" mindset that creates unreliable software. Managers don't want programmers to take their time and do it right, they want results as fast as possible. So programmers don't get the chance to make sure that memory used is unallocated once unsed and they forgot to close out recordsets and files once they are finished with them.
I was let go from my past two jobs because I wasn't quick enough. But my programs ran reliably, and didn't have as many Help Desk calls.
What the managers want is "Good Enough" code, as in good enough to work and do what they want. They don't care if it crashes the system several times a day or more, as long as they can ship it to the customer.
Sorry but I have heard that before, it didn't happen then and it won't happy now.
Apple is still in the loop in designing the PowerPC chip with IBM and Motorola, they have too much invested to switch right now.
I just do not see it happening. BTW nice of Apple to pick up Al Gore, Al needed a job.
But then it was Civilization based, wasn't it?
If you loved Master of magic, you might love Age Of Magic when it is released. It is FreeCiv based. FreeCiv is an open sourced version of Civilization.
Orion, there are some things your future self wants you to know. From 2003 to 1980.
#1 Learn all you can about computers. I know you are doing this, but once IBM comes out with a computer, learn what you can about it. Look at a company named Microsoft, consider investing in it and sell by the year 1999 no matter what happens.
#2 When you go into the adolecent mental ward, don't be afraid to show your feelings towards Tawnie. When she goes back to Morris or tries to, tell her that you love her and see how that goes. This should come up in about 1982.
#3 Avoid eating snacks when you can, eat more vegtables and fruit, that way I can avoid having the weight problem that I have.
#4 Always go to church, usually the 11 am mass, you will meet your future wife there. Exchange phone numbers, take it slow, things will work out as they worked out for me.
#5 Try not to get so worried or upset, you'll just end up back in the hospital again. Keep taking your medicine and don't miss any appointments with the doctor.
#6 In 1985 you will meet some new friends in a new high school, take the deseg program that will take you into the city. One of your friends is named Mike, keep in contact with him. Whatever you do, don't leave him alone on May 31, 1999, get friends to help if possible. If he has a shotgun, take it away from him. Keep the alchahol away from him too.
#7 Tell your grandfather you were named after to get his postrate checked, he has cancer. If he takes too long, they won't be able to save him. Tell your other grandfather that you love him, and you want him to excercise more. He has a weak heart and will die in 1983 unless something is done. In my time, both my grandfathers died, one after the other.
#8 Don't go to Rolla, go to the Community College first, get an associates degree, and then go to Rolla or UMSL. Study hard, no parties, you can socialize, but sdon't get into heavy drinking. That will be your downfall if you get into drinking. Once I gave that up, life was a lot better.
#9 Exercise when you can, do a few pushups, or situps. Use your brother's weight bench. Do this at least for 15 minutes a day. You should get into better shape.
#10 Whatever you do, don't panic. Keep a level head and think about things before you do them. Each discusion you make will effect the outcome of your life.
Belive me or not, I am you, just in the future.
didn't Next made an "OpenStep" that they shared with HP and Sun and others? Whatever happened to it? Hello?
Why doesn't Apple just made Aqua a KDE or GNOME type of program that loads over X-Windows in Linux, OpenBSD and others? Add in a Carbon library and more, and then that GCC compiler to make OSX binaries, and there you have it!
It was one of the best Atari 2600 games that Activision made! I think it had its own sound chip.
Because companies that do make free games tend not to stay in business for very long. There was one company that cloned Pacman, Centiped, Donkey Kong, and others and had a free DOS version and an enhanced version with more levels and an editor for like $30USD each. It was called Champgames or something. It sank faster than the Titanic when the makers of the video games they tried to clone came back and sued them. Nicely done DOS based games, no Windows or Mac or Linux ports that I knew of. Plus when MAME came out, nobody was interested in playing them when they could play the real thing for almost nothing anyway.
Abandonware sites have some of the classic games for download, but get shut down real quick as soon as they get popular.
You might be able to find some from Gnutella clients; however, that is being cleaned out as well. Better hurry.
Yeah there was a pirated version that trashed your hard drive while you "played" with her. Don't pay to pirate, does it?
I had better luck with the real thing anyway, MacPlaymate was an animated blow-up doll.
how else is she going to marry a guy who admitted to slaughtering a bunch of Sand-Children and talks about a Dictatorship being a cool idea? Like many women, she is attracted to jerks. This jerk, apparently, becomes Darth Vader later on.
when they pry it from my cold dead fingers! 1.4M forever!
It is a virus on my WEBTV/MSNTV device.
:)
After dialing 911, I like to call those 1-900 numbers and order things for myself off of web stores.
P.S. All your base are belong to us! I just networked with a Sega Genesis running "Zero Wing"
it is called PNG and most modern browsers support it. So what is the big idea?
Because most PC Users do not have a need to emulate Mac stuff on their PC. It usually is the other way around, some DOS or Windows program that a Mac User cannot do without forces them to by PC Emulation software.
So really there isn't any money to be made in making a Mac emulator for the PC, no market, no money, so why do it? The main part is emulating the PowerPC processors, nobody to my knowledge has done that yet, but the 68K processors they have. So we have 68K Mac emulators, but they don't do much business.
like IBM for example, sure they support Linux but how many of their "Lotus" applications did they port to Linux? Big money setting up servers for businesses, but apparently not selling them the software that runs on Windows only platforms, but has been ported to Linux?
Just get it easier to use and configure and maybe it will start to do better. Nothing like doing a Red Hat 7.3 install only to have something fail on the X Server software. There ought to be an easy way to recover from that. Once Linux gets it, then it might start selling more copies.
More than bad management, bad marketing as well. Also they had "Commodore" as a parent company and it gave the Amiga company a bad rep. Many thought that the Amiga was nothing but a new C64 or C128 with slow disk drives and nothing for it but a bunch of games.
If Apple, IBM, HP, or one of the other companies that the Amiga company was offered to had bought it out, history would have unfolded differently.
Plus the Amiga did not keep up with the Mac and PC systems out there. Once they started getting 3D and Accelorated video cards in the early 1990's, the Amiga lost its advantage. Apple had to move to the PPC chips to get more power to compete with the WINTEL systems as the 68000 series had lost steam.
There also was a lack of developers and dealers for the Amiga after Commodore went belly up. Many thought that the Amiga was dead after that.
if someone wrote a Mac compatable ROM, Apple would sue them before they could make any decent money off of it.
The best bet would be to have college students disassemble a PowerMac G3/G4 ROM and write the interrupts and APIs that it supports and then have a second group design a ROM to those specs. Might as well release it to the open source, so that even if Apple sues, someone will have a copy of it out there.
I remember Adventure Contruction Set for the Amiga 1000. You designed the rooms, the items, and the characters and even did editing of the pixels for the graphics. It was cool, and it was a neat way to design games within the system and give them to your friends.
// that was a D&D type game but in BASIC and you could create your own adventures. How far back does this stuff go anyway?
Before that it was a game called "Wizard" for the Commodore 64 that was a "Jumpman" clone but used Wizards and Magic items. You could create your own disks to make your own levels. It also was fun.
Say doesn't Civilization have a map editor?
Way back before that I recall a BASIC game called EMONS for the Apple
Bring back Romana and K9, they really made the show! Fix the chameleon curcuit. Have The Master steal a new body. Bring back Darvos and the Daleks. Send in the Cybermen. But most importantly, regenerate The Doctor, into another actor.
since AmigaOS can be run on almost any platform now. AmigaOS XL allows it to run on WINTEL systems, and they have AmigaDE players for Linux and Windows. Soon, I expect, they will have an OSX player? Shouldn't be too hard to make since they already have a Linux version.
With some changes, they can get AmigaOS 4.0 to boot on a Mac if they wanted to. Really quite a nice OS as well, much smoother running than MacOS 9.2 and OSX.
Since the Amiga transcends the Amiga hardware and is multi-platform, it is much more valuable and viable than MacOS or OSX anyway. So who cares?