Why does the guy who says "Thank you for choosing Real Player" sound like he's speaking from the bottom of an aquarium?
Maybe it's his real voice, but for it to be the first thing you experience when you launch the player, and to have it sound horrible, is an immediate turn off. The really sad thing is that the audio on every Real thing I've played is jacked. It all sounds like it's underwater. I've used Real since what, version 2? On both windows and Mac, and the audio has always been horrible. I don't understand why it isn't fixed yet. Maybe your engineers can't hear it.
Not to mention usuability issues with the rest of the client. Buffering, not being able to scan video, horrible decompression in low bandwidth connections (i'm talking packet loss on high speed, not dial-up).
Is it really more important for Real to put an advertising channel out there than it is for them to make a product that's not crap? The only reason I install Real now is because every once in a while I stumble across a site that only uses it vs. WMP or QT. And I would rather use either one of those two over Real any day.
True. But I'm just projecting it a little further.
Assuming you're getting 1.5 hours out of a charge now. 2.5x that is 3.75 hours. Then what? you've got an empty, spent cartridge you can't refill. You may not be able to buy a new one, because it's not likely that a notebook manufacturer will settle on a standardized battery shape and size, and our local convenience store will only carry so many brands and sizes. You'll still need to carry all your power peripherals with you, because you'll have to revert back to your battery when the fuel cell runs out.
Electricity is essentially free, whereas replacing these fuel cells are liable to cost $30 each, at the bare minimum.
Ok, maybe it's me, but it seems that no one has thought about the practical implicaitons of how this works.
1) Take the idea of carrying your LiIon battery, and compact charger, throwing it away, and basically replacing it with the equivalent number of AA batteries needed to make a business trip.
1a) Now think about how much your back is going to hurt after dealing with that much weight in an airport.
2) OK, now take that thought, replace those AA batteries with something that's full of liquid, flammable liquid at that, and carry enough of those to power your laptop for a week long business trip.
3) Disposal of the spent cartridges. And the fact that this thing spits out steam (euphemistically called water vapor in the article) right near delicate electronic components. Does it have an exhaust pipe to make sure that you don't get condensation all over your expensive computer bits?
4) How does this really help? It might be cool to do for disposable batteries. I'd love to be able to get longer life in my flashlight with a battery like this, but not in my laptop with those kind of limitations.
When $70,000 a year journalists can't tell the grammatical difference between their, there and they're, having a prodigious vocabulary helps a lot.
I agree. But you missed the example: that you don't have to try to impress people with using really big words, when diminutive ones will do. ( I did it again.) Conveying the idea is more important than showing someone how smart you are.
Then leave. Working for that person will be an exercise in anguish.
Yes, but who said you were working for them? What if it's a co-worker? What if it's a client, who's in charge of your budget? That's no reason to treat them like idiots because they may not know the meaning of a 3+ syllable word.
God, this is going to sound trite, and like I'm blowing my own horn, but here goes.
Ok, I've been tested repeatedly, and I know where I stand overall on the "intelligence" thing. Repeated tests as a child and an adult have all given then same result, within a point or two. I moved around a lot as a kid, and every time I did, the new school system would have to test me to find out where to place me. There were a number of times where I'd go to the principal's office and hear "we've never seen test scores this high... umm.. we don't really know what to do with him." My parents not being financially well off, and this being in the day before "magnet schools" were common place, I usually just did my regular school work, and was asked to participate in the Gifted and Talented program. GT/TAG/Gifted (whatever the school I was at called it) had the benefit of exposing me to many different things. Sadly, I felt the school system under-served me. Anyway, being "bright" really hasn't helped. But here's a few things I've learned:
1) Learn to speak "normal". Yes, you may have a prodigious vocabulary, but it doesn't impress anyone. It's more important to convey your ideas in a clear manner than to bog them down in utterances that make people cogitate. (yes, that was deliberate) If you have to, try to keep technical jargon to a minimum. Learn to recognize when someone's eyes glaze over. That's not to be taken as a sign of triumph. It's the first indicator that you're not properly conveying what you what to get across. Metaphors are your friends.
2) If your tastes really are as eclectic as you say, prepare yourself to take a wide variety of courses. Take a diverse set of electives. Look at your hobbies, and go from there. I'm a movie effects junkie, so I've taken some film courses. An advertising course or two, etc. There's no reason to turn your nose up at any course. Just be prepared to find out that you may not be good at something. Me, I can't draw organic forms. If you can afford it, and have the time, it may be best if you try to do multiple majors. You will find that many curriculae overlap. I started as an engineering major, then switched to programming, then switched to something else. Then I took a financially driven hiatus. Now I'm a business major. Partially because there's no point in me trying to become an engineer at this point, since I'm now too old to be an effective "junior engineer". Ironically enough, a business major was the only major flexible enough to allow me to complete my degree without having to retake a whole lot of courses. In addition, I've also figured out that everything in this country is business driven. The only reason you're doing something in the work place is to drive business. So, I figured it was better to know how that worked. If I had college to do all over again, I'd do industrial design with some acting and film classes, and I'd date that girl, and break up with that other one.
3) Odds are you want to aim for your Master's. Go to school. Graduate. Work a few years. See what you like, get a Master's in it.
4) Accept the fact that there will be a bunch of people who never understand you, and never will. Learn to be sociable, one way or another.
5) Don't lord your superiority over anyone. You'll find that it burns more bridges than it creates. Humility is the best road. I hae no idea how many times, when asked how I figured something out, I just shrugged and said " I dunno" and just moved on.
6) Make friends with your professors at college. These people are some of the classic Gatekeepers who are in charge of a frightening amount of opportunity. In addition, don't look down on someone because they're lesser than you in position or title. These people should know their jobs, and know it pretty well. The amount of information stored in their heads is amazing. Be nice to all of them.
7) There are no such things as jobs that are beneath you. Yes, there are shit jobs, and will always be shit jobs. But, someone has to do them. And if tha
>10. One-step migration of files and programs to a new computer.
10. Who'd do this ? It's Microsoft choice never to open their API, they won't do it because they own 95% of the market and then only 5% of the public, mostly people used to obtaining soft for free, would care.
I think what he's referring to is the ability of most OS X and Unix users to set up a new machine, copy their home folder/directory to it, log out, log in, and all you files and settings are magically moved from one machine to the other. One step machine migration: Copy.
Try that in Windows. With settings tied to registry entries, and applications that put settings files all over the place, copying the users "Documents and Settings" folder doesn't get everything. Plus with some poorly written apps saving files in weird places, and not being able to see them later, yeah, it's a pain in the butt.
I think most Mac users will enjoy the day that the word "beleaguered" prefaces every mention of Microsoft's name in the press. I think most Linux users would enjoy it too, but that word has more special meaning for the Mac users.
I remember when it started showing up in front of Compaq's name before they got assimilated. It was kind of delicious.
I remember a long time ago someone saying that the first time we put on eye glasses, we became cyborgs. So I take a little issue with the fact that the guy with the dog tracking chip in his arm is a cyborg. maybe the first electronic cyborg.
Heck, I'm already on my way out of IT. I looked around one day, realized I was nearing 30, and no longer want to sit up late at night nursing server installs, or rebuilds, or be on call on weekends, or spend large parts of my day watching progress bars crawl across the screen. Plus, given that lots of IT guys become essentially obsolete at 35, I figured I'd best start analysing my options.
So, I'm doing an IT job that has tuition reimbursement, and am finally getting my degree which I hope to use to change fields. Then I'll do that for ten years or so, until the day comes where I no longer want to be in that field.
What about that injunction from Apple Records (the old Beatles record company) preventing Apple Computer from getting into the music business? Anyone know if this would apply?
The only problem I see with this is that the spammers will throw a fit, and this thing will spiral out of control, and EVERYONE will wind up paying for email.
Is that what we really want? How long before the price of email starts to climb due to "increased costs"? Have you bought a stamp for snail mail lately?
We really need to sit down and think this through. There's no way we're going to be able to ride financially on the back of the spammers.
The commons is actually a concept that's been around since the middle ages.
A significant part of The Enlightenment was based on it, and consequently, our Constitution and our copyright law, and many other things. It's not some new new idea that was cooked up in the 60's.
Seeing this makes me wonder what took them so long. If they had done this during the Challenger days, we'd probably have a better idea of what went wrong, and we wouldn't have had the setbacks with the space program that we did during the late '80's. Even thogh it couldn't bring back the lives lost, we would have had answers to what happened a little faster, which woul dhave helped the process along. Ideally, they should mount these wherever there may be something that needs to be monitored.
I know NASA has sensors everywhere on the Shuttle to monitor everything, but sometimes when sensors give strange readings, it's nice to be able to see what the actual end result is manifesting as.
I'm just saying it's long overdue, and could be used to provide more than just cool video footage of a launch. Two cameras coud interleave their picture at 15fps, and you'd get two full streams. But NASA will probably never do that.
Have their online content lag behind the print for a month, and sell the magazine. Advertisers are comfortable with print. They know the way print works.
Then you just have to get the info out before it gets stale. Revolutionise the printing process so it only has a one month lead time instead of a three.... hmmm....
So, I guess this means it will no longer be legal for Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us to film you as you walk through the store.
Although, I wonder if "Proper notificiation" just means a small sign in 1/2" letters saying "Patrons may be videotaped at any time. By shopping here, you agree to this".
Sadly, it'll probably take less than that.
I don't forsee the porn half going through though.
My example was trying to show that there is no way to map out every single step of the process, like you can building a car. It's just not possible. Therefore it's going to be impossible to get an exact estimate.
I understand that lots of the code is easy to estimate, but it's also likely that there will be parts that require months to get working right, or even a long time just to figure out. And it may only be a small fraction of the code, but it may be the most crucial.
Every creative process has parts that are easily estimated. A sculptor can guess how long it's going to carve his basic shape of his sculture from a brick of basic material. But it's hard to guess exactly how long it's going to take to sculpt the actual lines of the face. That's where the difficulty in modeling a creative process lies.
I'm also not saying it's not important, since time = money, especially in business. But a lot of businesses try to think of code as assembling a car as opposed to creating something, and try to manage it that way too.
It seems to me that the author of the article is trying to find a way to exactly quantify how much a program that does "X" will cost. And I'm saying that the best you're ever going to get is a good estimate. Granted, you can refine the estimate, but it's never going to get closer than a certain percentage of accuracy on average, simply because there are parts of programming that can not be quantified.
Every article I've read on this overlooks one thing that every programmer requires a small amount of.
Creativity.
It's something that's hard to be measured. Sadly, programming is not like assembling a car, where it can be broken down into infinitesimally smaller chunks, then added back together to get a whole.
For example: it takes six seconds to put this screw in place, so we'll stop the assembly line for 8 seconds, then the car moves on regardless, under the assumption that the screw was inserted.
Programming is not like that. I know I've stared for an hour at the screen trying to figure out why one line of code wasn't working.
Or sat there for a while trying to figure out how to approach a problem before writing another line of code.
Likening programming to a production line is not good. There's no way to know in advance how many lines of code there are going to be, nor how long each line is going to be. If you knew this, you could add up how long it would take the average person to key in the strokes, and there's your estimate. That doesn't work in software.
For time usage, software needs to be compared to any other creative process as opposed to a mechanical one. How long did it take daVinci to paint the Mona Lisa? An hour? Two? 3 days? Could he have guessed from the outset that it's going to take x amount of time? Probably not. He might have been able to give a ball park based on how fast he's painted similar stuff in the past, but he couldn't nail it down exactly.
Now, granted, as you develop time and experience, your estimations get better. In addition, yor time to completion gets better. (How long do you think it would have taken daVinci to paint a _second_ Mona Lisa? A lot less time than the first one, because he's done one, and he remember how he solved various problems, like how much of each color to mix to make a certain tone.) This is where talent and experience come in.
But until software becomes similar to assembling Lego bricks (which it will, one day, and has in some places), then it's going to be hard to quantitatively determine how long a given project will take. And even if it becomes like Lego stacking, there's still going to be some fudge factor because how to solve the problem has to be solved before solving the problem.
And sometimes you have to tear apart and start over because a brick is out of place, or it's just poorly designed.
Well.. it looks to me like it would probably be hackable by either a telnet connection or nullmodem cable through the appropriate connector on the box... I can't imagine the thing would be any more sophisticated than a Cisco Router or a Portmaster or similar equipment...
I used to play a lot. One game I decided to see how much of a bastard gnat I could be. In three months I went through 65-70 Scout Marauders. Stole three other players planets, and nuked them, would throw random mines and toll filghters everywhere throughout the galaxy. I would hunt down players planets, and then auction the info off to the highest bidder, while also auctioning off the info to the owner for me to keep my mouth shut. I kept my experience high, but my alignment pretty close to neutral, so I could switch from good to bad in a heartbeat. Everyone hated me. I had a blast. When I decided to quite the game, I sold _All_ of my stuff (and some of a few other players' too...) and took my lowly little Scout Marauder and filled it with Corbomite devices (I think it was around 4500 or so...), and then advertised my position. Sadly, one of my friends found me, and blew me up. And I took out his Federation Starship with the resulting blast. Ah well.. those were the days...
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the guy who says "Thank you for choosing Real Player" sound like he's speaking from the bottom of an aquarium?
Maybe it's his real voice, but for it to be the first thing you experience when you launch the player, and to have it sound horrible, is an immediate turn off. The really sad thing is that the audio on every Real thing I've played is jacked. It all sounds like it's underwater. I've used Real since what, version 2? On both windows and Mac, and the audio has always been horrible. I don't understand why it isn't fixed yet. Maybe your engineers can't hear it.
Not to mention usuability issues with the rest of the client. Buffering, not being able to scan video, horrible decompression in low bandwidth connections (i'm talking packet loss on high speed, not dial-up).
Is it really more important for Real to put an advertising channel out there than it is for them to make a product that's not crap? The only reason I install Real now is because every once in a while I stumble across a site that only uses it vs. WMP or QT. And I would rather use either one of those two over Real any day.
But yeah, answer the audio question.
And how are you going to get this thing through aiport security?
True. But I'm just projecting it a little further.
Assuming you're getting 1.5 hours out of a charge now. 2.5x that is 3.75 hours. Then what? you've got an empty, spent cartridge you can't refill. You may not be able to buy a new one, because it's not likely that a notebook manufacturer will settle on a standardized battery shape and size, and our local convenience store will only carry so many brands and sizes. You'll still need to carry all your power peripherals with you, because you'll have to revert back to your battery when the fuel cell runs out.
Electricity is essentially free, whereas replacing these fuel cells are liable to cost $30 each, at the bare minimum.
Ok, maybe it's me, but it seems that no one has thought about the practical implicaitons of how this works.
1) Take the idea of carrying your LiIon battery, and compact charger, throwing it away, and basically replacing it with the equivalent number of AA batteries needed to make a business trip.
1a) Now think about how much your back is going to hurt after dealing with that much weight in an airport.
2) OK, now take that thought, replace those AA batteries with something that's full of liquid, flammable liquid at that, and carry enough of those to power your laptop for a week long business trip.
3) Disposal of the spent cartridges. And the fact that this thing spits out steam (euphemistically called water vapor in the article) right near delicate electronic components. Does it have an exhaust pipe to make sure that you don't get condensation all over your expensive computer bits?
4) How does this really help? It might be cool to do for disposable batteries. I'd love to be able to get longer life in my flashlight with a battery like this, but not in my laptop with those kind of limitations.
When $70,000 a year journalists can't tell the grammatical difference between their, there and they're, having a prodigious vocabulary helps a lot.
I agree. But you missed the example: that you don't have to try to impress people with using really big words, when diminutive ones will do. ( I did it again.) Conveying the idea is more important than showing someone how smart you are.
Then leave. Working for that person will be an exercise in anguish.
Yes, but who said you were working for them? What if it's a co-worker? What if it's a client, who's in charge of your budget? That's no reason to treat them like idiots because they may not know the meaning of a 3+ syllable word.
God, this is going to sound trite, and like I'm blowing my own horn, but here goes.
Ok, I've been tested repeatedly, and I know where I stand overall on the "intelligence" thing. Repeated tests as a child and an adult have all given then same result, within a point or two. I moved around a lot as a kid, and every time I did, the new school system would have to test me to find out where to place me. There were a number of times where I'd go to the principal's office and hear "we've never seen test scores this high... umm.. we don't really know what to do with him." My parents not being financially well off, and this being in the day before "magnet schools" were common place, I usually just did my regular school work, and was asked to participate in the Gifted and Talented program. GT/TAG/Gifted (whatever the school I was at called it) had the benefit of exposing me to many different things. Sadly, I felt the school system under-served me. Anyway, being "bright" really hasn't helped. But here's a few things I've learned:
1) Learn to speak "normal". Yes, you may have a prodigious vocabulary, but it doesn't impress anyone. It's more important to convey your ideas in a clear manner than to bog them down in utterances that make people cogitate. (yes, that was deliberate) If you have to, try to keep technical jargon to a minimum. Learn to recognize when someone's eyes glaze over. That's not to be taken as a sign of triumph. It's the first indicator that you're not properly conveying what you what to get across. Metaphors are your friends.
2) If your tastes really are as eclectic as you say, prepare yourself to take a wide variety of courses. Take a diverse set of electives. Look at your hobbies, and go from there. I'm a movie effects junkie, so I've taken some film courses. An advertising course or two, etc. There's no reason to turn your nose up at any course. Just be prepared to find out that you may not be good at something. Me, I can't draw organic forms. If you can afford it, and have the time, it may be best if you try to do multiple majors. You will find that many curriculae overlap. I started as an engineering major, then switched to programming, then switched to something else. Then I took a financially driven hiatus. Now I'm a business major. Partially because there's no point in me trying to become an engineer at this point, since I'm now too old to be an effective "junior engineer". Ironically enough, a business major was the only major flexible enough to allow me to complete my degree without having to retake a whole lot of courses. In addition, I've also figured out that everything in this country is business driven. The only reason you're doing something in the work place is to drive business. So, I figured it was better to know how that worked. If I had college to do all over again, I'd do industrial design with some acting and film classes, and I'd date that girl, and break up with that other one.
3) Odds are you want to aim for your Master's. Go to school. Graduate. Work a few years. See what you like, get a Master's in it.
4) Accept the fact that there will be a bunch of people who never understand you, and never will. Learn to be sociable, one way or another.
5) Don't lord your superiority over anyone. You'll find that it burns more bridges than it creates. Humility is the best road. I hae no idea how many times, when asked how I figured something out, I just shrugged and said " I dunno" and just moved on.
6) Make friends with your professors at college. These people are some of the classic Gatekeepers who are in charge of a frightening amount of opportunity. In addition, don't look down on someone because they're lesser than you in position or title. These people should know their jobs, and know it pretty well. The amount of information stored in their heads is amazing. Be nice to all of them.
7) There are no such things as jobs that are beneath you. Yes, there are shit jobs, and will always be shit jobs. But, someone has to do them. And if tha
>10. One-step migration of files and programs to a new computer.
10. Who'd do this ? It's Microsoft choice never to open their API, they won't do it because they own 95% of the market and then only 5% of the public, mostly people used to obtaining soft for free, would care.
I think what he's referring to is the ability of most OS X and Unix users to set up a new machine, copy their home folder/directory to it, log out, log in, and all you files and settings are magically moved from one machine to the other. One step machine migration: Copy.
Try that in Windows. With settings tied to registry entries, and applications that put settings files all over the place, copying the users "Documents and Settings" folder doesn't get everything. Plus with some poorly written apps saving files in weird places, and not being able to see them later, yeah, it's a pain in the butt.
I think most Mac users will enjoy the day that the word "beleaguered" prefaces every mention of Microsoft's name in the press. I think most Linux users would enjoy it too, but that word has more special meaning for the Mac users.
I remember when it started showing up in front of Compaq's name before they got assimilated. It was kind of delicious.
I remember a long time ago someone saying that the first time we put on eye glasses, we became cyborgs. So I take a little issue with the fact that the guy with the dog tracking chip in his arm is a cyborg. maybe the first electronic cyborg.
Heck, I'm already on my way out of IT. I looked around one day, realized I was nearing 30, and no longer want to sit up late at night nursing server installs, or rebuilds, or be on call on weekends, or spend large parts of my day watching progress bars crawl across the screen. Plus, given that lots of IT guys become essentially obsolete at 35, I figured I'd best start analysing my options.
So, I'm doing an IT job that has tuition reimbursement, and am finally getting my degree which I hope to use to change fields. Then I'll do that for ten years or so, until the day comes where I no longer want to be in that field.
Then I'll run for president.
Whee.. replying to my own post... In addition to AFS...
4 36 1/1/
Coda:
http://coda.cs.cmu.edu/
and InterMezzo:
http://www.inter-mezzo.org/
and there's a review here:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/
Although, honestly, a 5 second search on google for "distributed filesystem" would have turned this up.
Ah, well.
It's called the Andrew File System.
http://www.psc.edu/general/filesys/afs/afs.html
There's another alternative with a different name, but I forget what it's called.
The treo 600 may be a good start.
m
http://treocentral.com/content/Stories/229-1.ht
What about that injunction from Apple Records (the old Beatles record company) preventing Apple Computer from getting into the music business? Anyone know if this would apply?
The only problem I see with this is that the spammers will throw a fit, and this thing will spiral out of control, and EVERYONE will wind up paying for email.
Is that what we really want? How long before the price of email starts to climb due to "increased costs"? Have you bought a stamp for snail mail lately?
We really need to sit down and think this through. There's no way we're going to be able to ride financially on the back of the spammers.
The commons is actually a concept that's been around since the middle ages.
A significant part of The Enlightenment was based on it, and consequently, our Constitution and our copyright law, and many other things. It's not some new new idea that was cooked up in the 60's.
It's a shame he didn't do more research.
Seeing this makes me wonder what took them so long. If they had done this during the Challenger days, we'd probably have a better idea of what went wrong, and we wouldn't have had the setbacks with the space program that we did during the late '80's. Even thogh it couldn't bring back the lives lost, we would have had answers to what happened a little faster, which woul dhave helped the process along. Ideally, they should mount these wherever there may be something that needs to be monitored.
I know NASA has sensors everywhere on the Shuttle to monitor everything, but sometimes when sensors give strange readings, it's nice to be able to see what the actual end result is manifesting as.
I'm just saying it's long overdue, and could be used to provide more than just cool video footage of a launch. Two cameras coud interleave their picture at 15fps, and you'd get two full streams. But NASA will probably never do that.
You're welcome.
Salon could do a _print_ magazine.
Have their online content lag behind the print for a month, and sell the magazine. Advertisers are comfortable with print. They know the way print works.
Then you just have to get the info out before it gets stale. Revolutionise the printing process so it only has a one month lead time instead of a three.... hmmm....
Oh yeah, I forgot, it's called "Wired". Oops.
So, I guess this means it will no longer be legal for Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us to film you as you walk through the store.
Although, I wonder if "Proper notificiation" just means a small sign in 1/2" letters saying "Patrons may be videotaped at any time. By shopping here, you agree to this".
Sadly, it'll probably take less than that.
I don't forsee the porn half going through though.
I do enjoy it.
My example was trying to show that there is no way to map out every single step of the process, like you can building a car. It's just not possible. Therefore it's going to be impossible to get an exact estimate.
I understand that lots of the code is easy to estimate, but it's also likely that there will be parts that require months to get working right, or even a long time just to figure out. And it may only be a small fraction of the code, but it may be the most crucial.
Every creative process has parts that are easily estimated. A sculptor can guess how long it's going to carve his basic shape of his sculture from a brick of basic material. But it's hard to guess exactly how long it's going to take to sculpt the actual lines of the face. That's where the difficulty in modeling a creative process lies.
I'm also not saying it's not important, since time = money, especially in business. But a lot of businesses try to think of code as assembling a car as opposed to creating something, and try to manage it that way too.
It seems to me that the author of the article is trying to find a way to exactly quantify how much a program that does "X" will cost. And I'm saying that the best you're ever going to get is a good estimate. Granted, you can refine the estimate, but it's never going to get closer than a certain percentage of accuracy on average, simply because there are parts of programming that can not be quantified.
Every article I've read on this overlooks one thing that every programmer requires a small amount of.
Creativity.
It's something that's hard to be measured. Sadly, programming is not like assembling a car, where it can be broken down into infinitesimally smaller chunks, then added back together to get a whole.
For example: it takes six seconds to put this screw in place, so we'll stop the assembly line for 8 seconds, then the car moves on regardless, under the assumption that the screw was inserted.
Programming is not like that. I know I've stared for an hour at the screen trying to figure out why one line of code wasn't working.
Or sat there for a while trying to figure out how to approach a problem before writing another line of code.
Likening programming to a production line is not good. There's no way to know in advance how many lines of code there are going to be, nor how long each line is going to be. If you knew this, you could add up how long it would take the average person to key in the strokes, and there's your estimate. That doesn't work in software.
For time usage, software needs to be compared to any other creative process as opposed to a mechanical one. How long did it take daVinci to paint the Mona Lisa? An hour? Two? 3 days? Could he have guessed from the outset that it's going to take x amount of time? Probably not. He might have been able to give a ball park based on how fast he's painted similar stuff in the past, but he couldn't nail it down exactly.
Now, granted, as you develop time and experience, your estimations get better. In addition, yor time to completion gets better. (How long do you think it would have taken daVinci to paint a _second_ Mona Lisa? A lot less time than the first one, because he's done one, and he remember how he solved various problems, like how much of each color to mix to make a certain tone.) This is where talent and experience come in.
But until software becomes similar to assembling Lego bricks (which it will, one day, and has in some places), then it's going to be hard to quantitatively determine how long a given project will take. And even if it becomes like Lego stacking, there's still going to be some fudge factor because how to solve the problem has to be solved before solving the problem.
And sometimes you have to tear apart and start over because a brick is out of place, or it's just poorly designed.
Well.. it looks to me like it would probably be hackable by either a telnet connection or nullmodem cable through the appropriate connector on the box... I can't imagine the thing would be any more sophisticated than a Cisco Router or a Portmaster or similar equipment...
Or maybe I'm wrong...
I used to play a lot. One game I decided to see how much of a bastard gnat I could be. In three months I went through 65-70 Scout Marauders. Stole three other players planets, and nuked them, would throw random mines and toll filghters everywhere throughout the galaxy. I would hunt down players planets, and then auction the info off to the highest bidder, while also auctioning off the info to the owner for me to keep my mouth shut. I kept my experience high, but my alignment pretty close to neutral, so I could switch from good to bad in a heartbeat. Everyone hated me. I had a blast. When I decided to quite the game, I sold _All_ of my stuff (and some of a few other players' too...) and took my lowly little Scout Marauder and filled it with Corbomite devices (I think it was around 4500 or so...), and then advertised my position. Sadly, one of my friends found me, and blew me up. And I took out his Federation Starship with the resulting blast. Ah well.. those were the days...
Hello Mr. Wozniak,
You've been credited with helping spawn the personal computing industry.
Two questions:
1) Are you happy?
2) In retrospect, would you have done anything differently?