£745,000. 75000 people. Fraud or not, they've scammed these people for on average just under £9.95 a person. Don't know about you, but if I found out I'd been scammed by two teenagers to the tune of a tenner for being greedy and gullible, I'd consider that a very cheap lesson and I might even have a laugh over it. Well done, Hunter twins, for making a million dollars out of greedy people. And another lesson learned: If you've got money, people get envious.
Now what I always find interesting is when the numbers don't work. According to TFA, "investors paid $47 for newsletters listing Marl's stock picks and $97 for a home version of the software". Yet on average, the investors are down just a tenner? I don't mean to nitpick, but to me that sounds like the bloody thing actually worked. Oh, wait, it was unregulated software. What would you expect from two 16-year-olds?
I'm a bit worried about the precedent this is setting though. If I choose to buy a newspaper with a horoscope in there, or if I buy horoscope software and the predictions don't come true, should I sue?
Facts should not be copyrightable. The fact that street A has postcode B, therefore should not be copyrightable, never mind that you 'invented' or 'generated' those facts. But I don't think your analogy is particularly strong.
If you blatantly make an analog copy of the Mona Lisa, that's copyright infringement even if the target work doesn't have the exact same colour values as the original. But what's happening here is more like trying to paint a copy of the Mona Lisa without ever looking at the original, merely based on descriptions a bunch of people give you. In other words, you will never know for sure how accurate your representation is going to be.
After years of work, you present your result to the general public, and it looks, well, like this. Next thing you know, the Canadian Post Office sues you for copyright infringement. Somehow I don't think (I might hope not!) that the judge will agree.
I'm interested in whether this would apply for bacteria only or if it goes for viruses as well. You see, bowel disorders (specifically inflammatory bowel disease) are a lot more prevalent in children with autism than in children without. I'm probably going to be flamed to hell for this, but this study would suggest that there might yet be a possible link between vaccines and autism. Studies so far have focused on the heavy metals in the vaccines.
I find general health worth tracking. For a while, as part of my new year's resolution, I had a spreadsheet to track my body weight and blood pressure as well as to keep a log of everything I ate and drank and the amount I had exercised. I also had columns where I'd score my subjective well-being and stress levels, and one for general comments.
Some interesting findings were that, unfortunately, exercise had a positive effect on my blood pressure. I also found that my stress levels strongly correlated with my alcohol intake the night before. Nothing like some first hand experience to learn something.
Later on I found out that the hormone cortisol is responsible for those stress levels and yes, released when taking alcohol. I'd hardly call what I did solid science, but it is nice to find out when solid science confirms your own feeble efforts.
Let's see - I've got at least acetic acid, citric acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, ammonium chloride, fructose, sucrose, maltodextrin, and monosodium glutamate. I might order in some sodium nitrite too, one of these days. Then there's ethanol, Iron (III) chloride, hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide and, AHA! some fertilizer. Then of course there's the precision scales and an improvised dragee pan - can't do without those for the good stuff, obviously.
Point in case - I happen to be a rather passionate amateur cook (thinking I should try making my own smarties one of these days). Most of the above chemicals are just cooking ingredients. Also, occasionally I like to grow my own veg. Peppers, tomatoes, that kind of stuff. And when I'm not cooking, sometimes I play around with electronics and make my own circuit boards.
Extremely suspicious, I'm sure.
Can we stop the "AAAAH!! TERRORISTS!" bullshit already, please, and get on with our lives?
You're in danger the second you step into Iran. Don't do business there, don't visit there.
There's obviously a different perception about what "justice" means there compared to in the United States. Frankly, I think the meaning of justice is distorted in both places; in one place by religion (and if you don't happen to believe the same as they do, death is deemed appropriate), in the other by money (and you'll rot in jail or at the very least be financially ruined for life if you step on the toes of big megacorporations). The message is the same. Conform to those in power, or be doomed. As long as *that* is the message of justice, we can't have true justice.
Every three months? At 900 dollars you can get 900 silicone keyboard protectors which will give you a clean keyboard every DAY for nearly the next 3 YEARS. And here's an other crazy idea: Silicone is more heat resistant than bacteria. Perhaps you don't want to toss away those silicone covers in the bin after a day, but sterilize them and re-use them.
"Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online."
They're not inconsistent standards. By default, Google just index bloody everything. Mr. Liebermann says he wants to counter terrorism but continues to define that as violent Islamist extremism. Apparently other forms of violent extremism (KKK) are tolerable. Who's being inconsistent here?
Also, free speech yada yada yada. Now, I don't have to agree with a viewpoint to defend people's right to express it. I do think that mr. Liebermann got one thing right- Sure, add a label to the search result, but don't block the result itself. As long as there's no tracking going on to see who's visiting labeled results, I'm fine with that. Just because I'm reading a page written by a suspected terrorist, that doesn't make me one too.
Many people have already pointed you to prefab solutions like you asked for, but some of them are a bit pricey; If you are going to have "lots of knobs" and the phidgets encoder gives you a single USB knob at 20 bucks, you might want to considering building your own or contacting an Arduino enthusiast who can pull off a custom model. As you can see, There are plenty of AVR based USB projects out there. A single ATMega has 6 a/d converters which you can use for rotary knobs, and at least 8 binary inputs which can be used for switches.
Unblurring without having any additional information has been done by academic software before using a process called blind deconvolution, look it up for some interesting pictures and videos.
It's a rather "expensive" (cpu-intensive) operation, and indeed having sensor data about how the camera has shaken during exposure would significantly help in restoring the image. Interestingly, even cheap smart phones with crappy cameras will often already have movement sensor on-board, so there are some possibilities to improve image quality right after taking a picture; all it takes is a bit of software. How long until someone here whips up an improved Android camera app?
I'm probably under-informed, but I haven't heard of any cameras with full-blown movement sensor, although I know some of them can work out portrait vs landscape by now. Sounds like camera manufacturers have some catching up to do in the hardware department.
Please hit them with a clue-bat at info@schoolmaster.nl. This page on their website requires silverlight as well:
http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Foldermateriaal/Magisterboek/tabid/615/language/nl-NL/Default.aspx
If you try installing the plug ins, you'll be redirected to the moonlight plugin. Which won't install because it is "not compatible with firefox 6". So in other words, it won't work on Linux. I wonder why am I not in the least bit surprised?
Just because you made it yourself doesn't mean it's worse than the proprietary alternative. I'm using the Volti volume control applet in my task bar. Yes, I contributed to it. I'm using it not because of the pride of having contributed to it, but because now that it's patched, it does what I need it to. I've also written HD24tools, of which I *am* proud. That has little to do with me having written it, and more with what I've actually accomplished by doing so: I've got about 3500 users in 70 countries, running a mix of Windows/Mac/Linux, and the owners of the proprietary solution recommend my software over their own. I'd hardly call that being resisted by the market. It just so happens that my software solves a few problems that the proprietary software does not.
1. Doing a disk dupe to binary file might yield a zip files that are corrupt, but if the zip header contains offsets where in the archive a file starts, you might have a use for just the files that you can recovey. You may still be able to unzip the rest. I assume that if this were "mission critical" data, you'd have backups, and that this is mostly a nostalgic recovery. Even if you can't recover all files, you'll have a use for the bits you *can* recover.
2. Do try the suggestion of using a different drive. The Superdisk recommended by another poster can be found- there's one going on eBay right now (pick up only- but people may be willing to help you get it posted).
3. If you live in a moist climate, your floppies may be unreadable due to mold. I've rescued many floppies by spinning them in an open, headless floppy drive and very gently removing the mold with a cotton bud dipped in medicinal alcohol. DON'T DO THIS unless there are visible dull/nonreflective spots on the surface of the floppy.
4. Make sure the drive heads are clean before attempting to read any diskettes.
5. It helps to actually still have a computer old enough that the BIOS can read floppy disks! If you do, it also may still be able to run CopyIIPC, allowing you to backup your floppies to empty ones (if you can find them!) before attempting further recovery.
6. The suggestion of a previous poster to try "all binary combinations" in a zip file may not be as hopeless as it sounds. When there's an error on part of a sector, the first part of the sector will read intact, the damage will be random and the rest will likely be a bit-shifted pattern of the original image (due to lost sync). Based on this, you should be able to make a pretty good estimate about the first and last part of the sector and you'll only need to correct the middle (assuming a sector only has 1 read error). I learned this when doing research for a home-brew copy protection mechanism based on the position of tiny holes drilled in floppy disks.
According to this page, RiverTrail "adds the ParallelArray data type to JavaScript [...] accessible by functions like combine, filter, map, reduce, etc. which perform work in parallel."
Hope that saved you some searching.
With no land, they've likely lost any ability to sustain themselves individually or as a culture.
FYI there didn't use to be as much land to the Netherlands as there is now. Quite a bit of it is below sea-level and used to be- wait for it- sea. Conquering that sea, pumping it away, building dykes and turning sea area in to land has been part of Dutch culture for a good while now. For those here who have been to the Hacking in Progress event in 1997 in Almere, the Netherlands- That whole area used to be sea.
Vaccine intolerance is real; side effects of administering a vaccine include death and severe allergic reaction. For the sake of argument, let's take all current scientific evidence we have and accept that vaccines never ever cause autism.
But consider that no blood tests are ever performed before vaccines are administered, to ensure the vaccine is going to be trouble free for the specific person receiving it. If one of the side effects of a vaccine includes death by allergy (as does happen), it's downright careless not to test all your subjects to see of they will tolerate the vaccine before actually vaccinating them. Instead, money is reserved to support the parents in case something goes wrong. As a parent, I'm sure that given the choice between monetary support or a healthy child, I'd choose the latter.
In my opinion, the lack of blood tests before vaccinating makes a pretty strong case for parents being suspicious of whatever is being administered to their children and rejecting it. Perfectly reasonable parents feel that the dangers of the "side effect" of a vaccine outweigh the risk of getting the disease that it's supposed to prevent; especially since we're talking about "just" the measles and not polio, smallpox or the black death. Given the choice between their child getting the measles or dying/becoming autistic, parents will take their chances and choose what is perceived by them as the lesser of two evils. Sure, it's not scientifically sound. But giving 100% of the population a vaccine which is known to be safe 99% of the time, yet failing to performing blood tests which might or might not protect the remaining 1%* obviously isn't good enough to ease the minds of parents with an autistic child.
Am I still sounding reasonable?
I'm the father of an autistic boy and feel that despite everything, I can't 100% rule out that the MMR had something to do with the onset of his autism (any more than I can rule out the opposite). A statement "The MMR vaccine is safe, probability>99.9%" is, in fact, not good enough. I'd love to get my daughter vaccinated against the measles, and mumps, and rubella, but I'm only being offered this in the form of an MMR cocktail. I'm willing to pay for any necessary blood tests and/or costs involved in getting her separate M, M, and R vaccines, but I'm not being given that option. What choice do I have left but not to vaccinate?
My bank recently started doing the "security question" thing. Just think of the potential.
"Was the name of your first childhood pet really Spotty '); DROP TABLE accounts;--?" "Oh yes, spotty tables we called him."
Can God create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it?
If we want to convince religious nutters, we really ought to stop asking that stupid question. Apparently this God-guy is omnipotent and happily juggles around all the matter in the universe. Being omnipotent and all would also implies he can clump together all the matter in the universe. For all we know, he even did at some point (scientists call it the "big bang"). The problem is that if you've got only one clump of matter drifting in space (ignoring for the time being that we should really be talking about space/time and space itself doesn't exist at that point), the concept of "lifting" doesn't exist at that point: if all matter is cliumped together, what are you gonna lift that rock *from*? So arguably not only can he, he already did and it doesn't make him any less omnipotent because the question is wrong.
My audience doesn't care whether I created perfectly clean code for my implementation, so why should I?
Because your audience isn't just end users. In rock band terms, the flute player doesn't only play to the radio audience, but also to fellow musicians.
Likewise, your audience isn't just your users, it's also the future maintainers of your software.
After you've made your fortune, and you are lying on a beautiful white-sand beach beneath palm trees with a long drink served by a beautiful native, give a thought to the people that now have to maintain your software.
True job satisfaction lies in the knowledge that you made life better not only for your users, but also for those who followed in your footsteps- and by setting the right example, for those who follow them.
Best of all, when you charge by the hour, you won't have to make a penny less because of it.
I don't think I'd be able to survive windows anymore without unxutils. No, mr. Troll, that has nothing to do with being a one-trick pony; it just so happens that UNIX-like skills tend to port well across OS platforms. It would be silly and a waste of time to throw all those skills right out of the window just to re-learn to do the same thing, but this time in a non-portable fashion. Also, I happen to like grep and all the other tools that Just Work.
Slashdot Mirror
£745,000. 75000 people. Fraud or not, they've scammed these people for on average just under £9.95 a person. Don't know about you, but if I found out I'd been scammed by two teenagers to the tune of a tenner for being greedy and gullible, I'd consider that a very cheap lesson and I might even have a laugh over it. Well done, Hunter twins, for making a million dollars out of greedy people. And another lesson learned: If you've got money, people get envious.
Now what I always find interesting is when the numbers don't work. According to TFA, "investors paid $47 for newsletters listing Marl's stock picks and $97 for a home version of the software". Yet on average, the investors are down just a tenner? I don't mean to nitpick, but to me that sounds like the bloody thing actually worked. Oh, wait, it was unregulated software. What would you expect from two 16-year-olds?
I'm a bit worried about the precedent this is setting though. If I choose to buy a newspaper with a horoscope in there, or if I buy horoscope software and the predictions don't come true, should I sue?
Facts should not be copyrightable. The fact that street A has postcode B, therefore should not be copyrightable, never mind that you 'invented' or 'generated' those facts. But I don't think your analogy is particularly strong.
If you blatantly make an analog copy of the Mona Lisa, that's copyright infringement even if the target work doesn't have the exact same colour values as the original. But what's happening here is more like trying to paint a copy of the Mona Lisa without ever looking at the original, merely based on descriptions a bunch of people give you. In other words, you will never know for sure how accurate your representation is going to be.
After years of work, you present your result to the general public, and it looks, well, like this. Next thing you know, the Canadian Post Office sues you for copyright infringement. Somehow I don't think (I might hope not!) that the judge will agree.
I'm interested in whether this would apply for bacteria only or if it goes for viruses as well. You see, bowel disorders (specifically inflammatory bowel disease) are a lot more prevalent in children with autism than in children without. I'm probably going to be flamed to hell for this, but this study would suggest that there might yet be a possible link between vaccines and autism. Studies so far have focused on the heavy metals in the vaccines.
I find general health worth tracking. For a while, as part of my new year's resolution, I had a spreadsheet to track my body weight and blood pressure as well as to keep a log of everything I ate and drank and the amount I had exercised. I also had columns where I'd score my subjective well-being and stress levels, and one for general comments. Some interesting findings were that, unfortunately, exercise had a positive effect on my blood pressure. I also found that my stress levels strongly correlated with my alcohol intake the night before. Nothing like some first hand experience to learn something. Later on I found out that the hormone cortisol is responsible for those stress levels and yes, released when taking alcohol. I'd hardly call what I did solid science, but it is nice to find out when solid science confirms your own feeble efforts.
Guess who was the first man on the moon according to one of *my* textbooks (written by a teacher- no, not in the US).
Louis Armstrong.
Absolutely brillant.
Let's see - I've got at least acetic acid, citric acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, ammonium chloride, fructose, sucrose, maltodextrin, and monosodium glutamate. I might order in some sodium nitrite too, one of these days. Then there's ethanol, Iron (III) chloride, hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide and, AHA! some fertilizer. Then of course there's the precision scales and an improvised dragee pan - can't do without those for the good stuff, obviously.
Point in case - I happen to be a rather passionate amateur cook (thinking I should try making my own smarties one of these days). Most of the above chemicals are just cooking ingredients. Also, occasionally I like to grow my own veg. Peppers, tomatoes, that kind of stuff. And when I'm not cooking, sometimes I play around with electronics and make my own circuit boards.
Extremely suspicious, I'm sure.
Can we stop the "AAAAH!! TERRORISTS!" bullshit already, please, and get on with our lives?
There's obviously a different perception about what "justice" means there compared to in the United States. Frankly, I think the meaning of justice is distorted in both places; in one place by religion (and if you don't happen to believe the same as they do, death is deemed appropriate), in the other by money (and you'll rot in jail or at the very least be financially ruined for life if you step on the toes of big megacorporations). The message is the same. Conform to those in power, or be doomed. As long as *that* is the message of justice, we can't have true justice.
Every three months? At 900 dollars you can get 900 silicone keyboard protectors which will give you a clean keyboard every DAY for nearly the next 3 YEARS. And here's an other crazy idea: Silicone is more heat resistant than bacteria. Perhaps you don't want to toss away those silicone covers in the bin after a day, but sterilize them and re-use them.
Nice number games there. Amongst young people, piracy is "common and accepted" by 70% of 75% - which is 52.5%. Read from those numbers what you like.
Yes, it must have been an honest mistake. "Sorry, I thought I wrote this stolen code myself". Happens to me all the time!
"Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online." They're not inconsistent standards. By default, Google just index bloody everything. Mr. Liebermann says he wants to counter terrorism but continues to define that as violent Islamist extremism. Apparently other forms of violent extremism (KKK) are tolerable. Who's being inconsistent here? Also, free speech yada yada yada. Now, I don't have to agree with a viewpoint to defend people's right to express it. I do think that mr. Liebermann got one thing right- Sure, add a label to the search result, but don't block the result itself. As long as there's no tracking going on to see who's visiting labeled results, I'm fine with that. Just because I'm reading a page written by a suspected terrorist, that doesn't make me one too.
Many people have already pointed you to prefab solutions like you asked for, but some of them are a bit pricey; If you are going to have "lots of knobs" and the phidgets encoder gives you a single USB knob at 20 bucks, you might want to considering building your own or contacting an Arduino enthusiast who can pull off a custom model. As you can see, There are plenty of AVR based USB projects out there. A single ATMega has 6 a/d converters which you can use for rotary knobs, and at least 8 binary inputs which can be used for switches.
Unblurring without having any additional information has been done by academic software before using a process called blind deconvolution, look it up for some interesting pictures and videos.
It's a rather "expensive" (cpu-intensive) operation, and indeed having sensor data about how the camera has shaken during exposure would significantly help in restoring the image. Interestingly, even cheap smart phones with crappy cameras will often already have movement sensor on-board, so there are some possibilities to improve image quality right after taking a picture; all it takes is a bit of software. How long until someone here whips up an improved Android camera app?
I'm probably under-informed, but I haven't heard of any cameras with full-blown movement sensor, although I know some of them can work out portrait vs landscape by now. Sounds like camera manufacturers have some catching up to do in the hardware department.
Please hit them with a clue-bat at info@schoolmaster.nl. This page on their website requires silverlight as well: http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Foldermateriaal/Magisterboek/tabid/615/language/nl-NL/Default.aspx If you try installing the plug ins, you'll be redirected to the moonlight plugin. Which won't install because it is "not compatible with firefox 6". So in other words, it won't work on Linux. I wonder why am I not in the least bit surprised?
Just because you made it yourself doesn't mean it's worse than the proprietary alternative. I'm using the Volti volume control applet in my task bar. Yes, I contributed to it. I'm using it not because of the pride of having contributed to it, but because now that it's patched, it does what I need it to. I've also written HD24tools, of which I *am* proud. That has little to do with me having written it, and more with what I've actually accomplished by doing so: I've got about 3500 users in 70 countries, running a mix of Windows/Mac/Linux, and the owners of the proprietary solution recommend my software over their own. I'd hardly call that being resisted by the market. It just so happens that my software solves a few problems that the proprietary software does not.
1. Doing a disk dupe to binary file might yield a zip files that are corrupt, but if the zip header contains offsets where in the archive a file starts, you might have a use for just the files that you can recovey. You may still be able to unzip the rest. I assume that if this were "mission critical" data, you'd have backups, and that this is mostly a nostalgic recovery. Even if you can't recover all files, you'll have a use for the bits you *can* recover.
2. Do try the suggestion of using a different drive. The Superdisk recommended by another poster can be found- there's one going on eBay right now (pick up only- but people may be willing to help you get it posted).
3. If you live in a moist climate, your floppies may be unreadable due to mold. I've rescued many floppies by spinning them in an open, headless floppy drive and very gently removing the mold with a cotton bud dipped in medicinal alcohol. DON'T DO THIS unless there are visible dull/nonreflective spots on the surface of the floppy.
4. Make sure the drive heads are clean before attempting to read any diskettes.
5. It helps to actually still have a computer old enough that the BIOS can read floppy disks! If you do, it also may still be able to run CopyIIPC, allowing you to backup your floppies to empty ones (if you can find them!) before attempting further recovery.
6. The suggestion of a previous poster to try "all binary combinations" in a zip file may not be as hopeless as it sounds. When there's an error on part of a sector, the first part of the sector will read intact, the damage will be random and the rest will likely be a bit-shifted pattern of the original image (due to lost sync). Based on this, you should be able to make a pretty good estimate about the first and last part of the sector and you'll only need to correct the middle (assuming a sector only has 1 read error). I learned this when doing research for a home-brew copy protection mechanism based on the position of tiny holes drilled in floppy disks.
Now all we need is a "sleep" function.
According to this page, RiverTrail "adds the ParallelArray data type to JavaScript [...] accessible by functions like combine, filter, map, reduce, etc. which perform work in parallel." Hope that saved you some searching.
FYI there didn't use to be as much land to the Netherlands as there is now. Quite a bit of it is below sea-level and used to be- wait for it- sea. Conquering that sea, pumping it away, building dykes and turning sea area in to land has been part of Dutch culture for a good while now. For those here who have been to the Hacking in Progress event in 1997 in Almere, the Netherlands- That whole area used to be sea.
Vaccine intolerance is real; side effects of administering a vaccine include death and severe allergic reaction. For the sake of argument, let's take all current scientific evidence we have and accept that vaccines never ever cause autism.
But consider that no blood tests are ever performed before vaccines are administered, to ensure the vaccine is going to be trouble free for the specific person receiving it. If one of the side effects of a vaccine includes death by allergy (as does happen), it's downright careless not to test all your subjects to see of they will tolerate the vaccine before actually vaccinating them. Instead, money is reserved to support the parents in case something goes wrong. As a parent, I'm sure that given the choice between monetary support or a healthy child, I'd choose the latter.
In my opinion, the lack of blood tests before vaccinating makes a pretty strong case for parents being suspicious of whatever is being administered to their children and rejecting it. Perfectly reasonable parents feel that the dangers of the "side effect" of a vaccine outweigh the risk of getting the disease that it's supposed to prevent; especially since we're talking about "just" the measles and not polio, smallpox or the black death. Given the choice between their child getting the measles or dying/becoming autistic, parents will take their chances and choose what is perceived by them as the lesser of two evils. Sure, it's not scientifically sound. But giving 100% of the population a vaccine which is known to be safe 99% of the time, yet failing to performing blood tests which might or might not protect the remaining 1%* obviously isn't good enough to ease the minds of parents with an autistic child.
Am I still sounding reasonable?
I'm the father of an autistic boy and feel that despite everything, I can't 100% rule out that the MMR had something to do with the onset of his autism (any more than I can rule out the opposite). A statement "The MMR vaccine is safe, probability>99.9%" is, in fact, not good enough. I'd love to get my daughter vaccinated against the measles, and mumps, and rubella, but I'm only being offered this in the form of an MMR cocktail. I'm willing to pay for any necessary blood tests and/or costs involved in getting her separate M, M, and R vaccines, but I'm not being given that option. What choice do I have left but not to vaccinate?
* projected autism rates.
My bank recently started doing the "security question" thing. Just think of the potential. "Was the name of your first childhood pet really Spotty '); DROP TABLE accounts;--?" "Oh yes, spotty tables we called him."
If we want to convince religious nutters, we really ought to stop asking that stupid question. Apparently this God-guy is omnipotent and happily juggles around all the matter in the universe. Being omnipotent and all would also implies he can clump together all the matter in the universe. For all we know, he even did at some point (scientists call it the "big bang"). The problem is that if you've got only one clump of matter drifting in space (ignoring for the time being that we should really be talking about space/time and space itself doesn't exist at that point), the concept of "lifting" doesn't exist at that point: if all matter is cliumped together, what are you gonna lift that rock *from*? So arguably not only can he, he already did and it doesn't make him any less omnipotent because the question is wrong.
Because your audience isn't just end users.
In rock band terms, the flute player doesn't only play to the radio audience, but also to fellow musicians.
Likewise, your audience isn't just your users, it's also the future maintainers of your software.
After you've made your fortune, and you are lying on a beautiful white-sand beach beneath palm trees with a long drink served by a beautiful native, give a thought to the people that now have to maintain your software.
True job satisfaction lies in the knowledge that you made life better not only for your users, but also for those who followed in your footsteps- and by setting the right example, for those who follow them.
Best of all, when you charge by the hour, you won't have to make a penny less because of it.
I don't think I'd be able to survive windows anymore without unxutils. No, mr. Troll, that has nothing to do with being a one-trick pony; it just so happens that UNIX-like skills tend to port well across OS platforms. It would be silly and a waste of time to throw all those skills right out of the window just to re-learn to do the same thing, but this time in a non-portable fashion. Also, I happen to like grep and all the other tools that Just Work.
You can hire a giant squid? AWESOME. The Bart Simpson in me wants to know *where*!