... then you've got some benefits in having someone else maintain it: 1) No need to maintain the hardware yourself -- including backup, redundancy, connectivity 2) Less cost to validate for each new release: it's amortized across the group of customers using that software
A company such as BestBuy, Borders, and so on already collects sales tax for the states where they have a presence. A company such as Amazon does enough volume of commerce that they can afford the accounting to figure whose tax is owed to whom.
But a small company may have only a few cents to collect for a given state over a day, week, month or even year. Counting the beans costs more than the beans are worth. Most likely, "Sales Tax Clearinghouse" companies will crop up, which will offer to file your forms with each state and distribute... for another fee.
When we ran an online store (selling Children's Books), most of our customers were out of state, but we did collect for our home state... which amounted to less than $50 per year most years, especially as many in-state customers were schools and churches (which do not pay sales tax). Multiply that by, what, 48 states that collect sales tax? The paperwork is horrendous.
One way to limit the AI is to have different levels of heuristics. Othello is a classic example: The novice user bases his moves on the number of stones turned by each move. The intermediate player bases his moves on a "position score": Corner good, next to corner bad, other edges good The advanced player looks at open area sizes, frontier exposure, limiting opponent moves, etc.
Unfortunately, most heuristic sets are not going to be that easy.
Circuit City won't be mourned, except that it's nice to have an alternative everyonce in a while when you need to have something, and it's out of stock at Best Buy.
Yes, I get the majority of my media and tech stuff online, but CC didn't start that way, they started as an appliance vendor. So did Best Buy, and there's a nice bright corner of BestBuy that nobody notices that has fridges, stoves, microwaves and that kind of crap you only buy once every ten years.
So what did CC do wrong?
1) Crappy selection: Once upon a time, I liked CC's CD selection better than Best Buy: it was large, well organized, and deep. More recently, they've got squat for selection, the same lousy prices as every other retailer, and when they've got big sales, everything's just basically in a pile, no alphabetizing to speak of beyond the first initial, if you're lucky.
2) Crappy service: Buying a camera or a laptop (I helped an idiot relative buy one of each, even though I told her the prices could be beaten online), requires the attention of a sales droid, and printing out about eight yards of paper, none of which are a receipt.
3)Computers, HD-TV, Blu-Ray are a commodity: if you can get them in WalMart, they're not a specialty item. Don't sell them like they are.
but mainly
4) Failed to adapt: Their stores continued, even after recent revamps, to look dark and scary, the way TV stores always used to look in the 70's. Who wants to go in there? The color red may have been a failure too: it means warning, danger, stay away (then again, BestBuy's black on yellow is the classic warning color combo, our eyes see that contrast better than anything else).
I seldom went into a Circuit City. The ones nearest to me were closed long ago (one's an Off Track Betting parlor, another became a Bed Bath and Beyond). They won't be missed.
I was a pre-med, then thought better of it (now, 24 years later I'm an IT director).
I despised Orgo, but did well in it. Perhaps it was more useful to me as a programmer/analyst for a pharmaceutical company than an average MD, but look at it this way:
Less of medicine is surgery than pharmacology. To understand pharmacology and pharmacodynamics, you need biochemistry, and organic chemistry as a base for that. Even the surgeons should understand what the anticoagulants, anaesthetics, anticonvulsants, etc. etc. (without leaving the a's) are doing to their patients while they're on the table.
When I started as a pre-med, there was a lot of talk of "holistic" medicine, and a good friend of the family was an osteopath... and it's bullhookey. Your body is a chemical engine, regulated by hundreds of mediating factors. Drugs affect the performance of these factors, or replace ones your body doesn't produce, or affects the chemical factories you don't like (cancer, fungi, viruses, fat cells) hopefully more than the ones you do (brain cells, muscle, intestinal lining, retinal cells -- no respective order implied).
There should be more emphasis on experimental *method* than crappy little experiments to isolate a solid from a liquid, but the science is the basis of everything that's happening to your patient that doesn't just involve physics (cutting them open, broken bones).
Both libraries and SFBC have the time factor against them: the new, hot stuff won't be there for a while.
To naysayers above who think the quality has declined, you're just stuck in a rut. The recent Hugo noms such as John Scalzi and Charlie Stross are writing a large volume of old-school-friendly SF: if you liked Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov when you were a teen, you'll still like this stuff.
A bit out there on the SF front would be Cemetary Dance -- they publish a couple of limited-edition hardbacks a month, and offer them as a subscription. Mostly horror, but good stuff. Cemetary Dance is an irregularly-published magazine of extremely high editorial quality.
I mentioned John Scalzi above, I'll mention him again because of his "Big Idea" entries in his blog at http://scalzi.com/whatever -- authors are invited to write about where they get their ideas from. Much more illuminating than cover blurbs, it reveals the heart of the story from the authors POV, and I haven't found a loser from that list yet.
If you're centralized, decentralize. If you're decentralized, centralize.
But seriously -- I'm not fond of SaaS without the infrastructure to support it. SalesForce is supposedly to support road warriors, but without offline access, and without broadband wireless cards, it's pretty much useless (and a real annoyance if you're dealing with people who calendar in a desktop app, and not your SalesForce calendar).
However, TCO should be lower for many SaaS implementations: the client company doesn't need to keep servers running, including the staff to support them. Software updates are basically free... and the big thing is that it's an EXPENSE versus a CAPITAL EXPENDITURE. Software as capital is silly, since it doesn't depreciate or appreciate in value like real property, but many companies have to deal with that in their financial environment when it crosses a certain price threshold.
The only thing you need is a fat, reliable pipe on both ends, and the system should be pretty darn useful. We're hosting with VPN in the middle, so DOS attacks and such should be unlikely.
...and not narrowing them! I certainly didn't think I'd be an IT project manager, product strategist or consultant (to name just a few of my current hats at the SW firm I work for). I didn't even think about things like that in college 25 years ago, when I added computer science to my pre-med curriculum, or 20 years ago, as an analyst for a pharmaceutical company (where the education at least paid off well).
When I was in high school, there were 9 school periods per day... my son has eight! He wants to take some 'interesting' classes, but the mere college track classes of English, Math, Science, Foreign Language and History, plus Gym (required in this state for all 4 years), add lunch and you've got one 'elective' -- which happens to be Orchestra, leaving no opportunity to find out if art, computers, psychology, or any of the other courses they offer might be interesting enough to try in college.
Yes, there's a little more slack in the schedule than I said: History and Foreign Language aren't all four years, and my son has skipped a lunch period to take a web design class (which for him proved to be about as challenging as lunch).
But between no-child-left-behind testing prep, state requirements, higher college entrance requirements, it gets harder and harder to be well-rounded and special enough for the colleges to notice. It then falls to extra-curricular activities (orchestra, football, Boy Scouts, etc.) which then fill even more of the day.
I don't know about most geeks, but I don't care to compete on foosball -- I'm a loner (now a Defender box, that's another story). I've been working from my home for three years now for a software firm 600 miles away... and I'm not just a code-hacker (in fact, I'm supposed to start weaning myself from coding all together), I'm a product manager and direct the product management group and set strategy for the company.
First off, dress code: the HQ office is reasonably casual (although they've had an anti-jeans-and-sneaks backlash lately, it doesn't get enforced), but hey it's 10:30AM and I'm wearing my bathrobe. If there wasn't a nice cool breeze and I want the windows open, I might not be wearing that (don't want to scare the neighbors).
Second, commute: I haven't calculated the carbon footprint change, but I'm sure driving less than I did three years ago. I'm sleeping later than I did at the previous job, and spending more time with my family.
Third, health: No flickering flourescents, no cube noise, I've had fewer headaches and I'm more productive. I've managed to not gain weight even with a pantry full of gourmet food downstairs. I'm also getting mid-day exercise and don't care if I come back needing a shower -- there's one right over there!
Yeah, I miss out on picnics and friday pizza (somebody's got to get on that Wonkavision stuff, or at least a pizza-capable fax -- no wait, that must be what Domino's uses already, I could skip that)
I was shocked, shocked to be told that a condition of APPLICATION was drug testing at a job interview three years ago. It was for a pharmaceutical company that probably makes the tests, so they likely get them cheaply enough to make it pay off versus only screening after extending a job offer.
I've had a couple of potential employers do credit checks, but IIRC they had to ask permission for that. That might be a local regulation (Illinois) so your mileage may vary.
During the late 1980's, Radio Shack declared that they were creating the first writeable CD. Called THOR-CD, they were a couple years before CD-R of any kind, and there was a whirlwind of press. Years went by, no product ever arrived.
I telecommute to a company six hundred miles away, and persuasion by email is impossible.
I send proposal after proposal, request for comment after request, but most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.
My boss (non pointy haired, but not much better) included.
And I'm a pretty persuasive writer (maybe not this message). But if it doesn't get read, it doesn't get responded to.
So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.
1) "Accelerando" by Charles Stross: Civs advanced enough to create computing will shortly turn all of their available power (the sun) into shells of 'computronium', each operating off the waste heat of the one inside it. With nearly infinite virtual worlds at your disposal, why go anywhere else?
2) "Berserker" by Fred Saberhagen: There are civs out there, but they're really, really quite to avoid being noticed by fleets of robotic intelligences sworn on eliminating all biological intelligences
3) "Quaarantine" by Greg Egan: We're cut off from the rest of the galaxy until we prove ourselves. What we're seeing of the sky is cleverly only showing what they want us to see.
I'm a bit of a fan of the "We're living in a computer simulation" theory too: since in the future there will be enough computing power to simulate a huge number of realities, the odds are greater that this is a simulation than that it isn't. It would also explain why socks disappear from the dryer, my car keys aren't where I left them, voting irregularities, etc.: Microsoft has got its hand in the kernel somewhere.
First off, the big players in this high-stakes format war, won't make hybrids. Sony didn't produce VHS machines for years and years, and it would just kill them to make an HD-DVD machine (they'd have to license Microsoft's codec, for one). Too much of their profit line depends on them dominating this format war. The same can probably be said for the HD-DVD big guns.
Second, when DVD came out, only a few otaku actually owned much media -- sure you had some treasured Babylon 5 taped off the air, and the last week's worth of her "stories," but did you shell out $79.95 for a two-episode set of ST:TOS or even $29.95 for bulky VHS movies? Kid-vid, yeah, but those wear out from use and get replaced (Disney's on the HD-DVD side, BTW).
On the other hand, DVDs were designed for sell-through: I own a few full series of shows, a lot of favorite movies, obscure movies, anime, etc. I'm not replacing them any time soon.
Third, for most people, DVD's are good enough!. Especially with older TV sets... would you really buy Friends on Blu-Ray, just to see how much makeup Ross is wearing on screen? It's not going to add much.
Fourth, it doesn't matter, because digital delivery is already here. Between iTunes, HD DVRs, NetFlix online, etc., you just don't need those silvery coasters anymore. I know I've cut down on purchases and rentals since I got a TiVo. There's always something to watch.
Those three attributes have always been my term for something that gets the job done, but may be a little ugly.
I set my wife's biz up with Thunderbird, but there's two big areas we still use Pegasus for: 1) Quick forms, such as notifications of shipment, are impossible to do in T-bird without significant XUL programming 2) So far as I am aware, T-bird still doesn't do mailing lists where the "To" address shows as a list name, rather than listing out all the recipients
It's got its problems (command line creation of mail messages re-wraps the source message, rather badly too), but it's been dependable.
You'll never get anything done "for real" until it's important. Whether it's a personal project like the console emulator you mentioned, or a for-hire piece of work, or a chunk of Mozilla you really care about, you'll do it when you have to.
26 years ago, I did part-time work on a PDP-11-based system as I entered college. I found that in my classes, I'd write a 1000-line program that produced ten lines of code... and at work, I'd have a 1000-line program that produces 10,000 pages of output a month, on a much more constrained system. And my 1000 lines of code were equivalent to 3000-line versions by other students (and yes, I had documentation in my code)
Constraints make you work better. Read 37Signals' blog to find out how to work with less.
Big projects happen in little steps. Take a project management class -- look at the Project Management Institute to understand "work units" and "earned value" -- understand how to get work done and measure it.
Well, let's see. In the last year or so: * Homebuilt PC had its *second* fan die * Son #1's HP desktop Maxtel hard drive gives boot warnings * Son #1's HP (replacement for above) laptop drive dies within 100 days of purchase (fixed under warranty) * Son #1's Moto-branded MP3 player hard drive dies (fixed under warranty) * Son #2's Dell PC fan dies * Son #2's Inoi MP3 player has battery problems * Wife's Creative MP3 player hard drive dies * My Cowon MP3 player had loose connections causing massive static (fixed under warranty) * My Toshiba 5005 mobo finally died (being fixed under warranty)
Meanwhile, my very old Palm 515 keeps on keepin' on.
I think it's communist EMP rays. Tinfoil hat time.
... shame on me. Third time the charm? Not a chance.
No way I'm going back to Borland for dev tools. In the late 80's, Turbo Pascal for the Mac was bug-ridden and behind on Mac system call support. A tech support call revealed they knew about it, and didn't care. The tech said that their sales were roughly half the number of copies in use, and it didn't pay for them to continue developing.
In the early 90's, after learning Paradox DOS at a customer request, Paradox Windows came out claiming upward compatibility... but it turned out to be only of the data. Not even a compatibility mode for DOS screens and procedures. Worthless. It was easier to move the customer to Foxpro!
So what's the benefit of Borland free toolkits? I've got GNU C++ I've got FOSS scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, Python) coming out my ears. I've got Microsoft's "Explore" versions of Visual Studio, also free I've got Java with lots of free dev tools if I really cared
The company I worked for while I was in college in the early '80's had my first encounters with hard drives: removable 52MB multi-platter packs in a washing-machine-sized enclosure.
In '84 at my next job, the Lisa HDD was 5MB for either $1500 or $2500, I don't remember exactly. I remember the first hard drives for the Mac whose controllers clipped onto the CPU, and I think ran around $1000 for $20.
I finally cracked down and bought a 20MB drive for a Mac Plus for $600 -- that was a bargain.
When I realize that you can get 4GB microSD cards, and 3" drives in the hundreds of GB for just a few hundred bucks, it's pretty darn amazing.
This story was told to me by a former boss, who had worked as a Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) tech.
A company was having sporadic crashes of a system that they couldn't figure out. They'd always happen in the middle of the night, and when they rebooted in the morning, everything would be fine.
Everything got replaced: power supplies, memory, backplanes, cables, CPUs... remember this was in the good ol' days when a PDP-11 CPU was about the size of a refrigerator, and a 25MB (yes MB) disc drive could be the size of a washing machine. It had gotten quite costly, and still the problems happened every once in a while.
So Digital decided to camp out on site until the problem recurred.
Days went by... nothing... until one night, the third-shift operator came back from his coffee break, and just like every night, he tossed his hat on top of the CPU. This time, though, he missed, and it hit the side of the CPU -- where it stuck! A few magnets in the hat made sure it would never hit the floor when he tossed it. If it landed on the top, the magnets wouldn't disturb anything, but on the side, it would execute the classic HCF.
The real equation you're seeing is that DSL keeps lowering the price of the baseline service -- they've picked an ADSL config that they thing is "good enough" and offer $9.99 teaser rates to get you going (more later). Here in a Chicago suburb, I can't even get decent DSL (I think I can get 384 now, but they won't promise anything so I won't subscribe), because I'm over 5 miles from the Central Office -- an odd corner in the coverage area.
Meanwhile, Comcast in the Chicago area costs $42.95 per month -- and another $15 or so if you don't have Cable TV! They claim that the download throughput is 6Mbit, but I'm usually in the 1800-2400 range. Now they're offering some kind of power boost service with 12Mb available for downloading larger files. Somehow I don't think they're really offering a dynamic QOS protocol -- and if they did, I'd rather have it for VOIP than bursty downloads.
But the real trick out there is the AT&T teasers. My mother (who lives nearly across the stree from the same CO) bought into the $9.99 teaser. When the first year was up recently, she was offered the standard $19.99 rate, or twice the speed for $15.99 -- again for a year only. Odds are they'll tweak it a bit more for $17.99 for the next year, until they get you hooked on the fat pipe, then you'll be willing to shell out the same bucks as Cable.
Slashdot Mirror
... then you've got some benefits in having someone else maintain it:
1) No need to maintain the hardware yourself -- including backup, redundancy, connectivity
2) Less cost to validate for each new release: it's amortized across the group of customers using that software
A company such as BestBuy, Borders, and so on already collects sales tax for the states where they have a presence.
A company such as Amazon does enough volume of commerce that they can afford the accounting to figure whose tax is owed to whom.
But a small company may have only a few cents to collect for a given state over a day, week, month or even year. Counting the beans costs more than the beans are worth.
Most likely, "Sales Tax Clearinghouse" companies will crop up, which will offer to file your forms with each state and distribute... for another fee.
When we ran an online store (selling Children's Books), most of our customers were out of state, but we did collect for our home state... which amounted to less than $50 per year most years, especially as many in-state customers were schools and churches (which do not pay sales tax). Multiply that by, what, 48 states that collect sales tax? The paperwork is horrendous.
One way to limit the AI is to have different levels of heuristics.
Othello is a classic example:
The novice user bases his moves on the number of stones turned by each move.
The intermediate player bases his moves on a "position score": Corner good, next to corner bad, other edges good
The advanced player looks at open area sizes, frontier exposure, limiting opponent moves, etc.
Unfortunately, most heuristic sets are not going to be that easy.
Circuit City won't be mourned, except that it's nice to have an alternative everyonce in a while when you need to have something, and it's out of stock at Best Buy. Yes, I get the majority of my media and tech stuff online, but CC didn't start that way, they started as an appliance vendor. So did Best Buy, and there's a nice bright corner of BestBuy that nobody notices that has fridges, stoves, microwaves and that kind of crap you only buy once every ten years. So what did CC do wrong? 1) Crappy selection: Once upon a time, I liked CC's CD selection better than Best Buy: it was large, well organized, and deep. More recently, they've got squat for selection, the same lousy prices as every other retailer, and when they've got big sales, everything's just basically in a pile, no alphabetizing to speak of beyond the first initial, if you're lucky. 2) Crappy service: Buying a camera or a laptop (I helped an idiot relative buy one of each, even though I told her the prices could be beaten online), requires the attention of a sales droid, and printing out about eight yards of paper, none of which are a receipt. 3)Computers, HD-TV, Blu-Ray are a commodity: if you can get them in WalMart, they're not a specialty item. Don't sell them like they are. but mainly 4) Failed to adapt: Their stores continued, even after recent revamps, to look dark and scary, the way TV stores always used to look in the 70's. Who wants to go in there? The color red may have been a failure too: it means warning, danger, stay away (then again, BestBuy's black on yellow is the classic warning color combo, our eyes see that contrast better than anything else). I seldom went into a Circuit City. The ones nearest to me were closed long ago (one's an Off Track Betting parlor, another became a Bed Bath and Beyond). They won't be missed.
As a developer, our team was once taken to task by a client for having messages of "An unexpected error has occurred..."
They wanted to know what expected errors there were that we were hiding.
I was a pre-med, then thought better of it (now, 24 years later I'm an IT director).
I despised Orgo, but did well in it. Perhaps it was more useful to me as a programmer/analyst for a pharmaceutical company than an average MD, but look at it this way:
Less of medicine is surgery than pharmacology. To understand pharmacology and pharmacodynamics, you need biochemistry, and organic chemistry as a base for that. Even the surgeons should understand what the anticoagulants, anaesthetics, anticonvulsants, etc. etc. (without leaving the a's) are doing to their patients while they're on the table.
When I started as a pre-med, there was a lot of talk of "holistic" medicine, and a good friend of the family was an osteopath... and it's bullhookey. Your body is a chemical engine, regulated by hundreds of mediating factors. Drugs affect the performance of these factors, or replace ones your body doesn't produce, or affects the chemical factories you don't like (cancer, fungi, viruses, fat cells) hopefully more than the ones you do (brain cells, muscle, intestinal lining, retinal cells -- no respective order implied).
There should be more emphasis on experimental *method* than crappy little experiments to isolate a solid from a liquid, but the science is the basis of everything that's happening to your patient that doesn't just involve physics (cutting them open, broken bones).
Both libraries and SFBC have the time factor against them: the new, hot stuff won't be there for a while.
To naysayers above who think the quality has declined, you're just stuck in a rut. The recent Hugo noms such as John Scalzi and Charlie Stross are writing a large volume of old-school-friendly SF: if you liked Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov when you were a teen, you'll still like this stuff.
A bit out there on the SF front would be Cemetary Dance -- they publish a couple of limited-edition hardbacks a month, and offer them as a subscription. Mostly horror, but good stuff. Cemetary Dance is an irregularly-published magazine of extremely high editorial quality.
I mentioned John Scalzi above, I'll mention him again because of his "Big Idea" entries in his blog at http://scalzi.com/whatever -- authors are invited to write about where they get their ideas from. Much more illuminating than cover blurbs, it reveals the heart of the story from the authors POV, and I haven't found a loser from that list yet.
If you're centralized, decentralize. If you're decentralized, centralize.
But seriously -- I'm not fond of SaaS without the infrastructure to support it. SalesForce is supposedly to support road warriors, but without offline access, and without broadband wireless cards, it's pretty much useless (and a real annoyance if you're dealing with people who calendar in a desktop app, and not your SalesForce calendar).
However, TCO should be lower for many SaaS implementations: the client company doesn't need to keep servers running, including the staff to support them. Software updates are basically free... and the big thing is that it's an EXPENSE versus a CAPITAL EXPENDITURE. Software as capital is silly, since it doesn't depreciate or appreciate in value like real property, but many companies have to deal with that in their financial environment when it crosses a certain price threshold.
The only thing you need is a fat, reliable pipe on both ends, and the system should be pretty darn useful. We're hosting with VPN in the middle, so DOS attacks and such should be unlikely.
...and not narrowing them!
I certainly didn't think I'd be an IT project manager, product strategist or consultant (to name just a few of my current hats at the SW firm I work for). I didn't even think about things like that in college 25 years ago, when I added computer science to my pre-med curriculum, or 20 years ago, as an analyst for a pharmaceutical company (where the education at least paid off well).
When I was in high school, there were 9 school periods per day... my son has eight! He wants to take some 'interesting' classes, but the mere college track classes of English, Math, Science, Foreign Language and History, plus Gym (required in this state for all 4 years), add lunch and you've got one 'elective' -- which happens to be Orchestra, leaving no opportunity to find out if art, computers, psychology, or any of the other courses they offer might be interesting enough to try in college.
Yes, there's a little more slack in the schedule than I said: History and Foreign Language aren't all four years, and my son has skipped a lunch period to take a web design class (which for him proved to be about as challenging as lunch).
But between no-child-left-behind testing prep, state requirements, higher college entrance requirements, it gets harder and harder to be well-rounded and special enough for the colleges to notice. It then falls to extra-curricular activities (orchestra, football, Boy Scouts, etc.) which then fill even more of the day.
I don't know about most geeks, but I don't care to compete on foosball -- I'm a loner (now a Defender box, that's another story).
I've been working from my home for three years now for a software firm 600 miles away... and I'm not just a code-hacker (in fact, I'm supposed to start weaning myself from coding all together), I'm a product manager and direct the product management group and set strategy for the company.
First off, dress code: the HQ office is reasonably casual (although they've had an anti-jeans-and-sneaks backlash lately, it doesn't get enforced), but hey it's 10:30AM and I'm wearing my bathrobe. If there wasn't a nice cool breeze and I want the windows open, I might not be wearing that (don't want to scare the neighbors).
Second, commute: I haven't calculated the carbon footprint change, but I'm sure driving less than I did three years ago. I'm sleeping later than I did at the previous job, and spending more time with my family.
Third, health: No flickering flourescents, no cube noise, I've had fewer headaches and I'm more productive. I've managed to not gain weight even with a pantry full of gourmet food downstairs. I'm also getting mid-day exercise and don't care if I come back needing a shower -- there's one right over there!
Yeah, I miss out on picnics and friday pizza (somebody's got to get on that Wonkavision stuff, or at least a pizza-capable fax -- no wait, that must be what Domino's uses already, I could skip that)
I was shocked, shocked to be told that a condition of APPLICATION was drug testing at a job interview three years ago. It was for a pharmaceutical company that probably makes the tests, so they likely get them cheaply enough to make it pay off versus only screening after extending a job offer.
I've had a couple of potential employers do credit checks, but IIRC they had to ask permission for that. That might be a local regulation (Illinois) so your mileage may vary.
During the late 1980's, Radio Shack declared that they were creating the first writeable CD. Called THOR-CD, they were a couple years before CD-R of any kind, and there was a whirlwind of press. Years went by, no product ever arrived.
m l
Read more here: http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/thorcd88.ht
space bees
I telecommute to a company six hundred miles away, and persuasion by email is impossible.
I send proposal after proposal, request for comment after request, but most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.
My boss (non pointy haired, but not much better) included.
And I'm a pretty persuasive writer (maybe not this message).
But if it doesn't get read, it doesn't get responded to.
So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.
1) "Accelerando" by Charles Stross: Civs advanced enough to create computing will shortly turn all of their available power (the sun) into shells of 'computronium', each operating off the waste heat of the one inside it. With nearly infinite virtual worlds at your disposal, why go anywhere else?
2) "Berserker" by Fred Saberhagen: There are civs out there, but they're really, really quite to avoid being noticed by fleets of robotic intelligences sworn on eliminating all biological intelligences
3) "Quaarantine" by Greg Egan: We're cut off from the rest of the galaxy until we prove ourselves. What we're seeing of the sky is cleverly only showing what they want us to see.
I'm a bit of a fan of the "We're living in a computer simulation" theory too: since in the future there will be enough computing power to simulate a huge number of realities, the odds are greater that this is a simulation than that it isn't. It would also explain why socks disappear from the dryer, my car keys aren't where I left them, voting irregularities, etc.: Microsoft has got its hand in the kernel somewhere.
First off, the big players in this high-stakes format war, won't make hybrids. Sony didn't produce VHS machines for years and years, and it would just kill them to make an HD-DVD machine (they'd have to license Microsoft's codec, for one). Too much of their profit line depends on them dominating this format war. The same can probably be said for the HD-DVD big guns.
Second, when DVD came out, only a few otaku actually owned much media -- sure you had some treasured Babylon 5 taped off the air, and the last week's worth of her "stories," but did you shell out $79.95 for a two-episode set of ST:TOS or even $29.95 for bulky VHS movies? Kid-vid, yeah, but those wear out from use and get replaced (Disney's on the HD-DVD side, BTW).
On the other hand, DVDs were designed for sell-through: I own a few full series of shows, a lot of favorite movies, obscure movies, anime, etc. I'm not replacing them any time soon.
Third, for most people, DVD's are good enough!. Especially with older TV sets... would you really buy Friends on Blu-Ray, just to see how much makeup Ross is wearing on screen? It's not going to add much.
Fourth, it doesn't matter, because digital delivery is already here. Between iTunes, HD DVRs, NetFlix online, etc., you just don't need those silvery coasters anymore. I know I've cut down on purchases and rentals since I got a TiVo. There's always something to watch.
Those three attributes have always been my term for something that gets the job done, but may be a little ugly.
I set my wife's biz up with Thunderbird, but there's two big areas we still use Pegasus for:
1) Quick forms, such as notifications of shipment, are impossible to do in T-bird without significant XUL programming
2) So far as I am aware, T-bird still doesn't do mailing lists where the "To" address shows as a list name, rather than listing out all the recipients
It's got its problems (command line creation of mail messages re-wraps the source message, rather badly too), but it's been dependable.
If it goes away, it will be missed.
You'll never get anything done "for real" until it's important. Whether it's a personal project like the console emulator you mentioned, or a for-hire piece of work, or a chunk of Mozilla you really care about, you'll do it when you have to.
26 years ago, I did part-time work on a PDP-11-based system as I entered college. I found that in my classes, I'd write a 1000-line program that produced ten lines of code... and at work, I'd have a 1000-line program that produces 10,000 pages of output a month, on a much more constrained system. And my 1000 lines of code were equivalent to 3000-line versions by other students (and yes, I had documentation in my code)
Constraints make you work better. Read 37Signals' blog to find out how to work with less.
Big projects happen in little steps. Take a project management class -- look at the Project Management Institute to understand "work units" and "earned value" -- understand how to get work done and measure it.
Well, let's see. In the last year or so:
* Homebuilt PC had its *second* fan die
* Son #1's HP desktop Maxtel hard drive gives boot warnings
* Son #1's HP (replacement for above) laptop drive dies within 100 days of purchase (fixed under warranty)
* Son #1's Moto-branded MP3 player hard drive dies (fixed under warranty)
* Son #2's Dell PC fan dies
* Son #2's Inoi MP3 player has battery problems
* Wife's Creative MP3 player hard drive dies
* My Cowon MP3 player had loose connections causing massive static (fixed under warranty)
* My Toshiba 5005 mobo finally died (being fixed under warranty)
Meanwhile, my very old Palm 515 keeps on keepin' on.
I think it's communist EMP rays. Tinfoil hat time.
The real short end of the stick is businesses -- they can still be called by any marketer, shill, and general garbage dealer.
So, if you've got a home-based business, you'll get called by credit cards, insurance, registrars, SEO-ers, office supplies, etc. etc.
Telling them you're on the DNC does no good, they say you're on a list of businesses, you get called.
... shame on me. Third time the charm? Not a chance.
No way I'm going back to Borland for dev tools.
In the late 80's, Turbo Pascal for the Mac was bug-ridden and behind on Mac system call support. A tech support call revealed they knew about it, and didn't care. The tech said that their sales were roughly half the number of copies in use, and it didn't pay for them to continue developing.
In the early 90's, after learning Paradox DOS at a customer request, Paradox Windows came out claiming upward compatibility... but it turned out to be only of the data. Not even a compatibility mode for DOS screens and procedures. Worthless. It was easier to move the customer to Foxpro!
So what's the benefit of Borland free toolkits?
I've got GNU C++
I've got FOSS scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, Python) coming out my ears.
I've got Microsoft's "Explore" versions of Visual Studio, also free
I've got Java with lots of free dev tools if I really cared
No sir, no Borland for me.
The company I worked for while I was in college in the early '80's had my first encounters with hard drives: removable 52MB multi-platter packs in a washing-machine-sized enclosure.
In '84 at my next job, the Lisa HDD was 5MB for either $1500 or $2500, I don't remember exactly. I remember the first hard drives for the Mac whose controllers clipped onto the CPU, and I think ran around $1000 for $20.
I finally cracked down and bought a 20MB drive for a Mac Plus for $600 -- that was a bargain.
When I realize that you can get 4GB microSD cards, and 3" drives in the hundreds of GB for just a few hundred bucks, it's pretty darn amazing.
The real irony is that the PageRank of that article is 0.
Or is it a conspiracy?
This story was told to me by a former boss, who had worked as a Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) tech.
A company was having sporadic crashes of a system that they couldn't figure out. They'd always happen in the middle of the night, and when they rebooted in the morning, everything would be fine.
Everything got replaced: power supplies, memory, backplanes, cables, CPUs... remember this was in the good ol' days when a PDP-11 CPU was about the size of a refrigerator, and a 25MB (yes MB) disc drive could be the size of a washing machine. It had gotten quite costly, and still the problems happened every once in a while.
So Digital decided to camp out on site until the problem recurred.
Days went by... nothing... until one night, the third-shift operator came back from his coffee break, and just like every night, he tossed his hat on top of the CPU. This time, though, he missed, and it hit the side of the CPU -- where it stuck! A few magnets in the hat made sure it would never hit the floor when he tossed it. If it landed on the top, the magnets wouldn't disturb anything, but on the side, it would execute the classic HCF.
The real equation you're seeing is that DSL keeps lowering the price of the baseline service -- they've picked an ADSL config that they thing is "good enough" and offer $9.99 teaser rates to get you going (more later). Here in a Chicago suburb, I can't even get decent DSL (I think I can get 384 now, but they won't promise anything so I won't subscribe), because I'm over 5 miles from the Central Office -- an odd corner in the coverage area.
Meanwhile, Comcast in the Chicago area costs $42.95 per month -- and another $15 or so if you don't have Cable TV! They claim that the download throughput is 6Mbit, but I'm usually in the 1800-2400 range. Now they're offering some kind of power boost service with 12Mb available for downloading larger files. Somehow I don't think they're really offering a dynamic QOS protocol -- and if they did, I'd rather have it for VOIP than bursty downloads.
But the real trick out there is the AT&T teasers. My mother (who lives nearly across the stree from the same CO) bought into the $9.99 teaser. When the first year was up recently, she was offered the standard $19.99 rate, or twice the speed for $15.99 -- again for a year only. Odds are they'll tweak it a bit more for $17.99 for the next year, until they get you hooked on the fat pipe, then you'll be willing to shell out the same bucks as Cable.