No kidding, I'm less than 45 minutes from the city limits of a fairly large city (St. Louis), and approx 5 miles (8km) from a state highway that runs nearly straight into the city and I cannot get over 28.8 dialup (oh about once a month or so I get a 33.6 connect, usually last about 5 min before I lose the connection all together) and that is the BEST I can get without satalite, and that may not work (river valley, the hill cut me from full cell signall to nothing in less than a mile).
How about finding a way to incourage the "baby bells" to upgrade EXISTING infrastructure outside of cities before spending even more money on downtown.
I realize that being able to upgrade a few miles of systems for 100k people is more lucrative than upgradeing a dozen miles per 100 people, but this is getting rediculous when as little as 10 miles makes the difference between 2005 and 1965 in terms of capability (but not necessarily quality within that capability).
An interesting thing about the built in factors for the incest taboo is they seem to be built in during the first six years.
Most people form who family is and isn't by age six. This explains why, even though raised with an incest taboo, a person who meets someone who is a sibling for the first time after they've both entered peuberty may find that person sexualy attractive even if they know that person is thier long-lost sister/brother. (although fictional consider Luke and Lea, a bit of sexual tension between them at first)
Only problem is WHEN is the box 'stuffed'. Probably not 100% at the end. thus if you cap at say 5k votes and 1k vote twice somehow, unless they all vote last, you lose up to 1K real votes that count.
A better system would be one that didn't have a cap, just big ass warning when it thought too many had voted.
An even better sytem is one that prevents Joe Smith from voting in 2 states and three precints of each twice. Though that is much harder to do and maintain the anonymity required to prevent bought or coerced votes.
Solid State doesn't mean indestructable. There are some electrical and I believe chemical reactions going on. You have a process that generates electrical potential differential and moving electrons. They do slowly loose thier ability to generate electricity and eventually have to be replaced.
Also there are other parts in a solar power system for the home that wear out. There are the power converters and regulators as well as the batteries (though if you are running solar to suppliment being on grid this is much reduce, possibly eliminated) and associated chargers and such, they wear out as well.
One interesting idea I read about for putting backup capacity in the system was using a flywheel system. Put a big heavy cylinder in a vacumed out chamber on EXTREEMLY low friction bearings and use electromagnets to spin it up with a tiny trickle current to keep it spinning, then if your house is suddenly knocked off grid (hurricane, iced lines falling, drunk hitting pole, ect.) or the grid has over-demand, just extract the energy electromagnetically. One guy was claiming a refrigerator sized unit burried in the back yard would need virtually zero maintenence for 20+ years and got a very high efficiency. His company was also selling larger systems for bussiness and smaller units the size of a central air unit.
Something like that might make a good way to store the power from ones solar/wind/cow-fart power generation systems. They certainly sounded like a good alternative to backup generators.
And explorers and adventurers and those hunting fame and fortune.
Also look at Australia, IIRC didn't they start as a penal colony. I think they turned out pretty good (at least the Australians I've met have been pretty cool people, including some rather attractive ones as well).
Come to think of it those Early Americans had a bit of a penchant for rebellion also.
Actually solar panles are prety eco-UNfriendly to produce in many respects. Also cost per kw isn't significantly better than getting it from the grid (yet) once you take in the fact they do wear out and need replacement.
However decentralizing the power generation IS a good thing (your security point I believe), and a major upswing in demand would help push/fund/encourage research to reduce the downsides by improving thier effecient, manufacture cost, and longevity.
So on a whole I'm for increasing thier use and production. Along with wind and tide motors and fuel cells and almost any other sort of alternative energy.
Actually you indirectly prove one of my points. Morrowind for xbox is a bad fit imho, You lose half the fun without mods and the contruction set. Try the pc version (and perhaps get the expansions) and look online for mods, MUCH better.
The thing about Morrowind is the user added content and customization capacity, something you don't get with the xbox version. With the better bodies mods (Dark Elves that are atractive, not dark-skined people with traces of scales) and the ability to add in your own building and dungeons and so on it gets a lot better.
Still even playing the built in plot is fairly entertaining, assuming they managed to get the xbox version somewhat faithfull to the pc version.
And yeah the more dynamic the more data you have to download on each connect, which even with normal residential broadband could be a hassle. Though some dynamic data is easy enough; type 034 house facing west at 10023,20795 could be sent as a few bytes I'm shure, add in a couple dozen more for paint shceme 17 using colors 14,8,29,3 and locked and it's not too bad. But start adding in detailed custom clothing and coats of arms with individualy created art and re-mapping of terrain with elevation and vegetation changes and so it gets prohibitive all to easy, that's why I said it probably wasn't doable as yet.
Unfortunately the right of self defence is being erode here as well. Used to be if someone broke into your house it was grounds to use whatever force necessary to repell him. Now if looks like he might not have been directly threatening you or someone else you wih rape murder or bodily harm you stand a good chance of being charged and possibly convicted.
Still if someone breaks into my house I'm NOT going to try and find out if he just wan't to take the tv and my cash or my head. The old saying goes: 'better to be tried by twelve than carried by six'.
"A race of poorly educated, ignorant cretins." Who are mostly decended from europeans, thus the same race (the human race is all the same to me, but hey I didn't start with pseudo racism here).
Also these poorly educated, ignorant cretins put the first man on the moon, the ORIGINAL gps system, played a major part in ending WWII for the good guys, and a few other noteworthy things. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but really if your going to troll at least come up with somthing a)orinal b)doesn't so badly self reflect and c)has some thin sliver of being remotely believable.
Actually Morrowind isn't that big, it's less than a half mile on it's long axis (I wasn't thinking of the second island added in the later expansion), it just gave that impression through clever landscaping.
100 PC's in three times the space is a LOT more than one per square mile. And of there wouldn't be an even placement of pc's, they'll gather at towns and other interesting places.
As far as boring, empty spaces, well that's where pc built towns and the like come in. A nlank canvas leaves much more room to be creative on, provide you have sufficient brushes and paints to work with.
Also I figure 100 people online at a time, maybe 150-250 total 'inhabitants' plus maybe as many npc's depending on how it's put together.
Again I supose it all depends on the structure of the environment.
I really would like to see an online world with an averaged space.25 miles square to 1 mile square on average for all logged in pc's. With enough room for player interaction with the environment such as housing, landscaping(within limits), road building, ect. You could have a game that practically builds itself as long as the simulation behind it was robust enough and seeded with enough interesting npc's and monsters and other items,events,places, etc.
I guess what I'm really looking for is a fantasy world simulator that's a bit more sophisticated than we can do right now and not crowded, with a bit of a frontier like feel.
It's the whole 'massive' part that I get tired of, what I'd like is a game that's just kinda big. Bigger world per player.
UO is the one I have the most experience with (I once lived where I had sub second ping times and better than 28.8) and it was always to crowded. For UO's size more than 50 players is to much.
As far as requiring grouping, well on one hand the second M is for multi-player, on the other locking the player into a type of play that isn't intuitively need for the genre and natural mechanics of the game does kinda suck, and on the gripping hand no one forces you can always take your bussiness elsewhere.
What I would like to see is something about twice to three times the size of morrowind (to start), that's persistant state, and runs at most 100 people per instance of the world (per server, or realm or shard or whatever).
The gun ban nuts I just don't get. The facts and are completely against them, yet they still prattle on like flat earthers. Me I just tend to (over)react to the misconceptions and falsehoods they tend to blather on about. Sorry if it looks like I lumped you in with them, though most repeating thier crap have just heard it so often they think it's true (tell a lie often enough and people take it for the truth).
Problem is most people will assume they have the reflexes and/or experience and/or whatever that makes it safer for them to go way to fast.
And no 25 isn't safer than any other age. Certainly not because of experience.
In my experience males in thier mid twenties and females about 5-8 years younger are the most likely to go flying down the road weaving in and out with no signals like an idiot, or some other stupid stunt. The other two big categories of idiots are lower middle incomers in thier 30's to early 40's driving some big vehicle they think makes them 'safer' or special somehow.
While the above is anectedotal and should be largely treated as such I will add that I tend to average about 80-100 miles of travel a day, mixed highway and local varying from light urban to dirt tracks in a cow pasture (that had an official road name, a state trooper lived back there raising a few cattle in his spare time of all things).
Small nit: "cars are as dangerous as handguns in terms of the number of accidental deaths they cause," Actually cars are FAR more dangerous in terms of numbers of accidental deaths. (dozens of times more dangerous IIRC, it's still many times more even adjusted for the per capita ownership of both).
I suspect in part it's because the inherent hazzard of being careless with a gun is blantantly obvious to most people and the same cannot be said of cars.
To give folks some perspective, my mom now lives fairly close (less than 50'miles IIRC) from New Madrid and I live just south of st.louis (about 30 miles from city limits). It's about a 3 hour drive to visit my mom (it'd be 2.5 if all highway).
The New Madrid quake referenced above did serious property damage in St. Louis: "At St. Louis, many houses were damaged severely and their chimneys were thrown down." to qoute the linked article.
I dunno why Californians are still waiting for the 'big one' when Missouri has already had it. (Or so I say anytime my relatives out there say anything about quakes).
Anything ingested except maybe water and clean air have the potential to screw up some tiny percentage through various reactions.
I remember hearing about one guy who a pretty nice/good person by all acounts, yet every great once in a while his temper would be uncontrollable and he would scream and yell at the slightest provocation or even none at all.
Finally one time he hit someone and it scared him so bad he started digging into it hard. Eventually they traced to a food allergy. He stopped eating that fairly common food (chocolate IIRC) and has never had a problem since.
The real question would be is it a 1 in a million thing (like the guy I just mentioned) or frequent enough to be problem.
Problem is with it so heavilly banned (all out of proportion from what we do know) there isn't even the kind of research going on to figure these things out like we should.
Heinlein (the sf author) had a fairly good rep for predicting things, when asked what his secret was he said (paraphrasing here) ask the experts in on the subject how long it would be before we have technology to do x and divide the interval in half.
Actually in some respects space might be easier to 'patroll'. You have math on your side here.
Gravity, delta-v, and time pretty much determine everything for the likely future. You have to throw mass overboard to accellerate, thus if you know where something is comming from and going to, you can seriously narrow where it can be based on when it left.
If you suspect smugglers are going from Ceres to Phobos, you get limited set of possible courses. Some times for liftoff require eigther huge amounts of reaction mass, or huge transit times. The first kills your cargo capacity, the second kills your smuglers.
There have been many good sf stories based on the limits of early stellar travel. Read the short story "The Cold Equations" by Heinlein for a good idea how serious it can be, but don't look for a happy ending.
And they already do not know the meaning of cancel. (AOL is well know for continuing to bill for months and months after you 'cancell', though they'll actually get your actuall connection turned off most of the time)
Clark Howard (nationaly syndicated radio host who does the whole save money, don't get riped off, consumer rights, kinda thing) Has even put up a 'fire AOL page' on his website(www.clarkhoward.com iirc) to help people with cancelling AOL.
The problem here sounds like HR wrote the specs. Back in 95 I saw a job listing that essentially required you to be one the people who wrote the first 6-10 rfc's, and had some other requirements that probably eliminated half of them. I don't recall wich company it was, but they were fairly big as I recognized them and wondered why they didn't bother to just send a formal letter to the three or four people who qualified. Then I saw the salary they were offering was less than $40k year.
I've also seen job listing for people with 20+ years devloping C++ aplications for windows (back in the 90's as well), listings for web designers with 10 years experience (less than 5 years AFTER mosiac), and other such impossible job requirements.
If you don't know enough about a field to know what's possible, let alone normal or reasonable, you should do at least SOME research before writing a job listing.
Mycroft
Re:He can't get a job, thats nothing..
on
Massive Layoffs At AOL
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think they just gave you that as an excuse. If that was software that YOU wrote then they're probably more concerned with your reactions to anything they might ask you to do with the code, fearing you might dissagree with something and start in on "I WROTE this so I know your wrong and I'm right", or possibly that you might think your intimate knowledge deserves more pay than they want to spend (which it likely would to be honest).
Also the fact that you're going from a one man company to an employee makes them wonder if your not planning on quiting as soon as things get better and possibly taking any clever ideas they've shown you into a new product based on your old one plus thier 'trade secrets'.
I could see where they could view hiring you as like hiring another employees s.o./ex-s.o. (and the way some people are about thier code it could be worse!).
You are likely joking, but really a lot of people live very close to thier means, or even past it.
The minute they start making any significant amount over what thier used to after graduation they go out and run up credit card bills, buy toys, a nice car a nicer house, and so on.
If they were to keep thier standards of living simular to what they had in college till all thier student loans were paid off and just save any extra and keep thier outgo (especially long term outgo such as house payments) down below what others at the same income level are doing they would find themselves much better off. Keep a credit card if you must, but never put on it more than you can pay off when the bill comes in.
You'd be suprised how much you can save. I saved about $3k in 8 months on a 24k a year job by simply not replacing my pos car right when I could, never using a credit card, not buying every toy I saw, not having cable tv, no longer trying to have a bleeding edge PC (I've given in a little there since then). I didn't really short myself much (not having cable tv GAVE me time as well as freed up $$) I still ate out some, hung out with my friends, saw a few movies, bought a few games and read several good books.
Of course if you have kids soon out of college the picture changes more than a little bit.
Can you even imagine trying to fit a whole computer in just one room, it' have to be a small stadium at least.
At least that's what they said circa 1960. Think about how much more powerfull todays desktop pc's are over 1970's mainframes. I've got a 64bit processor with more cache memory than many mainframes had total in the early days.
So right now, yes the server cluster that could handle that for just a few dozen users would probably need a small nuclear reactor and put out more heat than a small city, but how about in 20 years?
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding, I'm less than 45 minutes from the city limits of a fairly large city (St. Louis), and approx 5 miles (8km) from a state highway that runs nearly straight into the city and I cannot get over 28.8 dialup (oh about once a month or so I get a 33.6 connect, usually last about 5 min before I lose the connection all together) and that is the BEST I can get without satalite, and that may not work (river valley, the hill cut me from full cell signall to nothing in less than a mile).
How about finding a way to incourage the "baby bells" to upgrade EXISTING infrastructure outside of cities before spending even more money on downtown.
I realize that being able to upgrade a few miles of systems for 100k people is more lucrative than upgradeing a dozen miles per 100 people, but this is getting rediculous when as little as 10 miles makes the difference between 2005 and 1965 in terms of capability (but not necessarily quality within that capability).
Mycroft
An interesting thing about the built in factors for the incest taboo is they seem to be built in during the first six years.
Most people form who family is and isn't by age six. This explains why, even though raised with an incest taboo, a person who meets someone who is a sibling for the first time after they've both entered peuberty may find that person sexualy attractive even if they know that person is thier long-lost sister/brother. (although fictional consider Luke and Lea, a bit of sexual tension between them at first)
Mycroft
Well at least my night job's stil layoff safe for a good while.
Mycroft
Only problem is WHEN is the box 'stuffed'. Probably not 100% at the end. thus if you cap at say 5k votes and 1k vote twice somehow, unless they all vote last, you lose up to 1K real votes that count.
A better system would be one that didn't have a cap, just big ass warning when it thought too many had voted.
An even better sytem is one that prevents Joe Smith from voting in 2 states and three precints of each twice. Though that is much harder to do and maintain the anonymity required to prevent bought or coerced votes.
Mycroft
Solid State doesn't mean indestructable. There are some electrical and I believe chemical reactions going on. You have a process that generates electrical potential differential and moving electrons. They do slowly loose thier ability to generate electricity and eventually have to be replaced.
Also there are other parts in a solar power system for the home that wear out. There are the power converters and regulators as well as the batteries (though if you are running solar to suppliment being on grid this is much reduce, possibly eliminated) and associated chargers and such, they wear out as well.
One interesting idea I read about for putting backup capacity in the system was using a flywheel system. Put a big heavy cylinder in a vacumed out chamber on EXTREEMLY low friction bearings and use electromagnets to spin it up with a tiny trickle current to keep it spinning, then if your house is suddenly knocked off grid (hurricane, iced lines falling, drunk hitting pole, ect.) or the grid has over-demand, just extract the energy electromagnetically. One guy was claiming a refrigerator sized unit burried in the back yard would need virtually zero maintenence for 20+ years and got a very high efficiency. His company was also selling larger systems for bussiness and smaller units the size of a central air unit.
Something like that might make a good way to store the power from ones solar/wind/cow-fart power generation systems. They certainly sounded like a good alternative to backup generators.
Mycroft
And explorers and adventurers and those hunting fame and fortune.
Also look at Australia, IIRC didn't they start as a penal colony. I think they turned out pretty good (at least the Australians I've met have been pretty cool people, including some rather attractive ones as well).
Come to think of it those Early Americans had a bit of a penchant for rebellion also.
Mycroft
Actually solar panles are prety eco-UNfriendly to produce in many respects. Also cost per kw isn't significantly better than getting it from the grid (yet) once you take in the fact they do wear out and need replacement.
However decentralizing the power generation IS a good thing (your security point I believe), and a major upswing in demand would help push/fund/encourage research to reduce the downsides by improving thier effecient, manufacture cost, and longevity.
So on a whole I'm for increasing thier use and production. Along with wind and tide motors and fuel cells and almost any other sort of alternative energy.
Mycroft
Actually you indirectly prove one of my points. Morrowind for xbox is a bad fit imho, You lose half the fun without mods and the contruction set. Try the pc version (and perhaps get the expansions) and look online for mods, MUCH better.
The thing about Morrowind is the user added content and customization capacity, something you don't get with the xbox version. With the better bodies mods (Dark Elves that are atractive, not dark-skined people with traces of scales) and the ability to add in your own building and dungeons and so on it gets a lot better.
Still even playing the built in plot is fairly entertaining, assuming they managed to get the xbox version somewhat faithfull to the pc version.
And yeah the more dynamic the more data you have to download on each connect, which even with normal residential broadband could be a hassle. Though some dynamic data is easy enough; type 034 house facing west at 10023,20795 could be sent as a few bytes I'm shure, add in a couple dozen more for paint shceme 17 using colors 14,8,29,3 and locked and it's not too bad. But start adding in detailed custom clothing and coats of arms with individualy created art and re-mapping of terrain with elevation and vegetation changes and so it gets prohibitive all to easy, that's why I said it probably wasn't doable as yet.
Mycroft
Unfortunately the right of self defence is being erode here as well. Used to be if someone broke into your house it was grounds to use whatever force necessary to repell him. Now if looks like he might not have been directly threatening you or someone else you wih rape murder or bodily harm you stand a good chance of being charged and possibly convicted.
Still if someone breaks into my house I'm NOT going to try and find out if he just wan't to take the tv and my cash or my head. The old saying goes: 'better to be tried by twelve than carried by six'.
Mycroft
"A race of poorly educated, ignorant cretins."
Who are mostly decended from europeans, thus the same race (the human race is all the same to me, but hey I didn't start with pseudo racism here).
Also these poorly educated, ignorant cretins put the first man on the moon, the ORIGINAL gps system, played a major part in ending WWII for the good guys, and a few other noteworthy things. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but really if your going to troll at least come up with somthing a)orinal b)doesn't so badly self reflect and c)has some thin sliver of being remotely believable.
Mycroft
Actually Morrowind isn't that big, it's less than a half mile on it's long axis (I wasn't thinking of the second island added in the later expansion), it just gave that impression through clever landscaping. .25 miles square to 1 mile square on average for all logged in pc's. With enough room for player interaction with the environment such as housing, landscaping(within limits), road building, ect. You could have a game that practically builds itself as long as the simulation behind it was robust enough and seeded with enough interesting npc's and monsters and other items,events,places, etc.
100 PC's in three times the space is a LOT more than one per square mile. And of there wouldn't be an even placement of pc's, they'll gather at towns and other interesting places.
As far as boring, empty spaces, well that's where pc built towns and the like come in. A nlank canvas leaves much more room to be creative on, provide you have sufficient brushes and paints to work with.
Also I figure 100 people online at a time, maybe 150-250 total 'inhabitants' plus maybe as many npc's depending on how it's put together.
Again I supose it all depends on the structure of the environment.
I really would like to see an online world with an averaged space
I guess what I'm really looking for is a fantasy world simulator that's a bit more sophisticated than we can do right now and not crowded, with a bit of a frontier like feel.
Mycroft
It's the whole 'massive' part that I get tired of, what I'd like is a game that's just kinda big. Bigger world per player.
UO is the one I have the most experience with (I once lived where I had sub second ping times and better than 28.8) and it was always to crowded. For UO's size more than 50 players is to much.
As far as requiring grouping, well on one hand the second M is for multi-player, on the other locking the player into a type of play that isn't intuitively need for the genre and natural mechanics of the game does kinda suck, and on the gripping hand no one forces you can always take your bussiness elsewhere.
What I would like to see is something about twice to three times the size of morrowind (to start), that's persistant state, and runs at most 100 people per instance of the world (per server, or realm or shard or whatever).
Mycroft
The gun ban nuts I just don't get. The facts and are completely against them, yet they still prattle on like flat earthers. Me I just tend to (over)react to the misconceptions and falsehoods they tend to blather on about. Sorry if it looks like I lumped you in with them, though most repeating thier crap have just heard it so often they think it's true (tell a lie often enough and people take it for the truth).
Mycroft
Problem is most people will assume they have the reflexes and/or experience and/or whatever that makes it safer for them to go way to fast.
And no 25 isn't safer than any other age. Certainly not because of experience.
In my experience males in thier mid twenties and females about 5-8 years younger are the most likely to go flying down the road weaving in and out with no signals like an idiot, or some other stupid stunt. The other two big categories of idiots are lower middle incomers in thier 30's to early 40's driving some big vehicle they think makes them 'safer' or special somehow.
While the above is anectedotal and should be largely treated as such I will add that I tend to average about 80-100 miles of travel a day, mixed highway and local varying from light urban to dirt tracks in a cow pasture (that had an official road name, a state trooper lived back there raising a few cattle in his spare time of all things).
Mycroft
Small nit: "cars are as dangerous as handguns in terms of the number of accidental deaths they cause," Actually cars are FAR more dangerous in terms of numbers of accidental deaths. (dozens of times more dangerous IIRC, it's still many times more even adjusted for the per capita ownership of both).
I suspect in part it's because the inherent hazzard of being careless with a gun is blantantly obvious to most people and the same cannot be said of cars.
Mycroft
To give folks some perspective, my mom now lives fairly close (less than 50'miles IIRC) from New Madrid and I live just south of st.louis (about 30 miles from city limits). It's about a 3 hour drive to visit my mom (it'd be 2.5 if all highway).
The New Madrid quake referenced above did serious property damage in St. Louis: "At St. Louis, many houses were damaged severely and their chimneys were thrown down." to qoute the linked article.
I dunno why Californians are still waiting for the 'big one' when Missouri has already had it. (Or so I say anytime my relatives out there say anything about quakes).
Mycroft
That one had a few 'real' parts in it IIRC, whereas this apears to be pure leggo bricks.
Not 100% shure though.
Mycroft
Anything ingested except maybe water and clean air have the potential to screw up some tiny percentage through various reactions.
I remember hearing about one guy who a pretty nice/good person by all acounts, yet every great once in a while his temper would be uncontrollable and he would scream and yell at the slightest provocation or even none at all.
Finally one time he hit someone and it scared him so bad he started digging into it hard. Eventually they traced to a food allergy. He stopped eating that fairly common food (chocolate IIRC) and has never had a problem since.
The real question would be is it a 1 in a million thing (like the guy I just mentioned) or frequent enough to be problem.
Problem is with it so heavilly banned (all out of proportion from what we do know) there isn't even the kind of research going on to figure these things out like we should.
Mycroft
Heinlein (the sf author) had a fairly good rep for predicting things, when asked what his secret was he said (paraphrasing here) ask the experts in on the subject how long it would be before we have technology to do x and divide the interval in half.
Mycroft
Actually in some respects space might be easier to 'patroll'. You have math on your side here.
Gravity, delta-v, and time pretty much determine everything for the likely future. You have to throw mass overboard to accellerate, thus if you know where something is comming from and going to, you can seriously narrow where it can be based on when it left.
If you suspect smugglers are going from Ceres to Phobos, you get limited set of possible courses. Some times for liftoff require eigther huge amounts of reaction mass, or huge transit times. The first kills your cargo capacity, the second kills your smuglers.
There have been many good sf stories based on the limits of early stellar travel. Read the short story "The Cold Equations" by Heinlein for a good idea how serious it can be, but don't look for a happy ending.
Mycroft
And they already do not know the meaning of cancel. (AOL is well know for continuing to bill for months and months after you 'cancell', though they'll actually get your actuall connection turned off most of the time)
Clark Howard (nationaly syndicated radio host who does the whole save money, don't get riped off, consumer rights, kinda thing) Has even put up a 'fire AOL page' on his website(www.clarkhoward.com iirc) to help people with cancelling AOL.
Mycroft
The problem here sounds like HR wrote the specs.
Back in 95 I saw a job listing that essentially required you to be one the people who wrote the first 6-10 rfc's, and had some other requirements that probably eliminated half of them. I don't recall wich company it was, but they were fairly big as I recognized them and wondered why they didn't bother to just send a formal letter to the three or four people who qualified. Then I saw the salary they were offering was less than $40k year.
I've also seen job listing for people with 20+ years devloping C++ aplications for windows (back in the 90's as well), listings for web designers with 10 years experience (less than 5 years AFTER mosiac), and other such impossible job requirements.
If you don't know enough about a field to know what's possible, let alone normal or reasonable, you should do at least SOME research before writing a job listing.
Mycroft
I think they just gave you that as an excuse.
If that was software that YOU wrote then they're probably more concerned with your reactions to anything they might ask you to do with the code, fearing you might dissagree with something and start in on "I WROTE this so I know your wrong and I'm right", or possibly that you might think your intimate knowledge deserves more pay than they want to spend (which it likely would to be honest).
Also the fact that you're going from a one man company to an employee makes them wonder if your not planning on quiting as soon as things get better and possibly taking any clever ideas they've shown you into a new product based on your old one plus thier 'trade secrets'.
I could see where they could view hiring you as like hiring another employees s.o./ex-s.o. (and the way some people are about thier code it could be worse!).
Mycroft
You are likely joking, but really a lot of people live very close to thier means, or even past it.
The minute they start making any significant amount over what thier used to after graduation they go out and run up credit card bills, buy toys, a nice car a nicer house, and so on.
If they were to keep thier standards of living simular to what they had in college till all thier student loans were paid off and just save any extra and keep thier outgo (especially long term outgo such as house payments) down below what others at the same income level are doing they would find themselves much better off. Keep a credit card if you must, but never put on it more than you can pay off when the bill comes in.
You'd be suprised how much you can save.
I saved about $3k in 8 months on a 24k a year job by simply not replacing my pos car right when I could, never using a credit card, not buying every toy I saw, not having cable tv, no longer trying to have a bleeding edge PC (I've given in a little there since then). I didn't really short myself much (not having cable tv GAVE me time as well as freed up $$) I still ate out some, hung out with my friends, saw a few movies, bought a few games and read several good books.
Of course if you have kids soon out of college the picture changes more than a little bit.
Mycroft
Can you even imagine trying to fit a whole computer in just one room, it' have to be a small stadium at least.
At least that's what they said circa 1960. Think about how much more powerfull todays desktop pc's are over 1970's mainframes. I've got a 64bit processor with more cache memory than many mainframes had total in the early days.
So right now, yes the server cluster that could handle that for just a few dozen users would probably need a small nuclear reactor and put out more heat than a small city, but how about in 20 years?
Mycroft