There are quite a few areas (like, say, anywhere >2 miles outside of a suburb) where you can't get cable or DSL. These people still like to watch movies (which is one of the reasons why satellite TV is so big).
But that's just the advantage over internet distribution. No one's talking about the advantages over retail.
How many movies are in an average blockbuster. How many of you have gone there (ok, say five years ago back when you didn't just download it over your university connection) and they didn't have the movie you wanted to watch, or had already rented it?
If you have all of your collection on a hard drive, you can rent it out to everyone at once, no problem. And you can keep WAY more movies available at any one location.
The whole convenience of blockbuster is a good selection (or sometimes just large selection - how much luck do you have finding exactly the awful horror flick your friend recommended to you on p2p in any reasonable amount of time) and short time to get it - yes, it isn't as convenient as netflix or a download if you're planning ahead, but if you just want something to watch TONIGHT, it's a lot easier to stop at a store on your way home than scour p2p or call netflix and wait a day.
I could definitely see my parents (who don't have broadband) using this, and if it were tied into a fully stocked online store/rental (and therefore, I already had a video ipod) I could myself using it, too, when I don't have time to wait for a download.
It's not as good as a full download store for those of us on fat pipes, but a large portion of the country can't or won't get those, and for those people I could see this being quite useful (assuming you made the whole thing so easy to use that they wouldn't be intimidated by it - that'd be the hard part).
Hehe, there's your problem. From my experience in tech support in the labs, elementary educational software has to be some of the WORST written stuff I've ever seen. Sometimes I wonder if they even have a QA department, or if the guy just asks his dog to run it a few times and see if it crashes. They still crash constantly in OS X, the only difference is that they can't bring the whole system down with them any more.
Not to argue too much - you're absolutely right about OS 9 and earlier being crap for stability - no protected memory means any program can bring down the whole system. But edutainment programs.... *cringe*.
I'd say it was more right around the end of the 604e. PowerPC's have almost always been faster than a pentium clock for clock, and for a while apple (and clones) had 300-350 mhz 604e's and 300 mhz G3's while the pentium was at 266-300. There was a significant speed difference.
I'd say they were at least somewhat ahead all the way from the transition to the PPC to when the first athlons came out. Until then, Intel hadn't had any real need to push the speed of their processors too much, and the Motorola and IBM chip devs had managed to stay ahead of them in most counts. Then suddenly the athlon came out, and x86 chips pushed to 1 ghz in almost no time, while at the same time motorola completely stalled on their G4 development (it was originally announced at 500 mhz, wasn't it? Then they couldn't actually make those, and it got dropped to 450 mhz, and it stayed at 450mhz for a long time.
I think that part of apple's whole transition to style over speed came from the fact that, through a situation over which they had little control, they suddenly had a processor that had been stuck at the same mhz for over a year with only marginal improvements in sight. They started running dual G4's in everything, which helped a lot (you think they would have done the extra cost of that, especially BEFORE they had a real multi-tasking OS, if they had a choice?) but still couldn't keep up with a good Athlon in most apps, which are still usually single-threaded and gain nothing from the second processor. Look at the benchmarks from that time period - it becomes very apparent that in general tests that actually use both processors, the dual G4 was about as fast as a good Pentium or Athlon. In the tests that didn't, it was about 2/3 as fast. In the few things that actually used Altivec (if you think it was all marketing hype, you've never tried to run DivX on an old G3 500. A single G4 400 handles it fine), they jumped way ahead.
What this actually translated to, if you were actually using the system instead of just benchmarking it, was that for big multitaskers, the G4 was as good of a workstation as the current PC's. For Apple apps, which all took advantage of Altivec, it was a screaming fast machine. For games, or people who only run one or two apps at a time, it probably sucked compared to their PC at home.
I guess what I'm meaning with all this is that at one time, right before Intel really figured out how to work around the old x86 architecture they've been dragging around for years and AMD suddenly gave them some real competition, Macs were faster than PC's. Since then they've been somewhat slower, but I don't think that's necessarily been a choice that Apple made as much as it was a very bad run of luck.
Quake had a great graphics engine for the time, but what the heck did it innovate in terms of gameplay. you know, the fun factor, the reason you actually buy a game.
I've seen some wonderful engine work come out of id, but the most "innovative" gameplay element I've seen out of them are the decently interactive consoles in Doom 3.
Exactly. The "complaint" is that all these characters love this game, have loved playing their character to 60 in 5 man groups an our or two at a time, and don't want to have to sell their soul to the political back-stabbing of a the huge guild it takes to get anywhere in a raid.
I haven't quite hit it, as I'm only recently 60 and I haven't got through all the high level 5-mans yet. But I can look a month in the future and see that I'm not going to be any closer to raiding MC (because I'm in a guild for the friends, not for phat loot) and I will have thoroughly exhausted any interesting content left to me. I can drop the at that point, sure - in fact, I probably will. But the point of these complaints is that many people play an MMO for the friends, for the groups, for the social aspects. At some point with any game the game itself is going to get old and you have to choose between leaving your friends and being bored by the game. But when the game requires a monthly subscription, it makes you evaluate that tradeoff much more quickly and become much unhappier when you are given nothing new to do for your money.
I think the whole AQ event that they just released is a great idea, and the new 20-man dungeons in ZG and AQ are a good step between a 5-man and a 40-man raid. But I'm pretty disappointed to learn that their next big thing AFTER AQ is another 40-man dungeon. After completing the supposed hardest 5-man instances in the game, I see no reason they couldn't make something of a similar scale but greater difficulty, something that requires the same level of coordination between 5 people as MC does between 40. It still wouldn't be as hard as the 40-man raids, but having participated in some of the ZG boss fights, there is no comparison between them and the toughest fight I have seen in a 5-man instance. There has to be some middle ground, I just wish I had the feeling that they cared at all about reaching for it.
That's because most of the included TTS modules are based almost directly off of military research done in the late 70's and released into the public domain. While more recently there have been a few open source endeavours to improve free TTS, most of the research in that area in the last 20 years has been by corporations that AREN'T MS (like IBM) and kept under strict lock and key or expensive licenses. The text to speech included in Windows and OS X has barely changed in over 20 years. Of course it sounds like crap.
Well, it wouldn't out of the box, but throw a 6600 into it and it would yeah. that's the disgusting thing. It would probably crash every few days randomly, but it would run the games.
A cheap windows box can be had for $400... or you can game on the same hardware you have now with a copy of XP you have lying around from an old machine for... $0. 0 is a lot less than 400.
I personally found it confusing to connect buttons and objects in interface builder to backend code compared to.NET. Coming from a windows background its weird and feels like extra steps.
Those few extra steps are good design, a proven way of thinking about data. The data behind a text box should never be linked to the text box itself - what if you suddenly need another box that has to be linked to it? It's part of the model view controller design architecture that separates your data and logic from your display. You can do this in.NET, but it doesn't encourage you to at all, and it results in code that's a lot less neat much of the time. It can end up a little faster for throwing something together, but I honestly like the fact that interface builder encourages decent design that way.
That's just on the coding side. How I wish visual studio had better auto guides for making interface elements line up or conform to standards. Every time I touch the form builder interface in VS.net it feels like a bloated, uglier version of interface builder. The code's even uglier, too - I can hand edit the code interface builder makes no problem, VS.net puts a giant *do not touch* comment around all of its stuff, and for good reason.
I mean, heck, I get ticked off even driving an automatic when it doesn't get the idea that I NEED to accelerate right now, let alone if the car is randomly deciding this based on my location.
Even in ohio, there can easily be 30 minutes of straight roads at 55mph between you and a hospital. Going 75-80 on those (which in many cases, while not entirely safe is not that difficult, either) cuts ten minutes off of your trip. That can make enough of a difference in some circumstances that I'm definitely going to be doing it.
And that isn't even out west, where the time to a major city for treatment could be even worse. Only an idiot would recommend driving like that in New York, or even downtown columbus. But sometimes the middle of nowhere is really empty and far away from hospitals.
Simple: I script at work because that's what my boss wants me to do. I write automation software for testing. Some of these are easier as simple scripts. most of it would have been easier as something in a more full-featured language.
I still found very few instances where it was helpful for me to write another script to help in my development of these. And as a home user (which is where I spend most of my time on a computer) I have found no tasks where I find myself wishing I had written a script for it. There is just so little repetition.
I was not talking about the needs of a production system, where you want to automate as much as possible because very little of it requires any human interaction, but rather my needs as a computer user, which is almost entirely interactive.
Am I the only user in the world who almost never feels a need for a script?
Ok, maybe once a month, I'd like a small one... but almost every other task I do either
A. Will only be done once in that exact order, or B. Is short enough that it's only one extra click over executing a script.
I'm decently well versed in bash and darn near an expert in vbscript and batch, but I still haven't seen a need to write a single script for my home user needs.
And also, stop subscribing to the 1980's idea that a GUI is only for dumbing things down. A good, POWERFUL GUI makes a lot of command line tasks easier. Are there some things that are still easier to do on the command line? Yes. But which is easier, opening a menu to look for the command you want in a new program and then just using it, or scrolling through twenty man pages to find what you needed? A command line is only faster for the subset of things you already have memorized, and I'd rather spend my time getting my work done than memorizing every switch in grep.
Anyone who says there isn't design in the construction of a house has never worked construction. You have blueprints, but they're nowhere close to complete. I did at least as much problem-solving and design in that job as I do now as a code-jockey.
The difference is that you are taught standard ways of doing things, and can expect some degree of standardization from what other people are sending you. Every house is different, but they all have similar parts.
As opposed to software, where you have to solve large parts of exactly the same problem with every project (how unique is your web store? It shouldn't be unique at all, just some different names in the database and a different-looking front end. The code for the front end shouldn't even be new, nor should implementing a search be. But it is so many times).
That, I think, is the heart of the problem with subbing a job in CS right now. There isn't enough of an industry standard method of doing things to actually define what "done" is, or what quality is.
I've seen houses built by guys who build the way people code - none of them would pass building codes. Sure, they stand up... but the ceiling's only 6.5 feet tall because the guy who built it for himself was short.
...is that Superman was intended primarily as an interpretation of the American volksgeist, IMHO. The image of him swooping in and saving the day could be seen as a direct symbolic justification for American imperialism and foreign interventionism...and we've seen how well that turned out.
I was with you on the first part.
Superman isn't a representation of American imperialism, but rather a symbol of the basic stance (which most would consider moral) that someone who has the power to do good, should, that has been manipulated throughout the centuries by power-hungry leadership into empire-building. He, like most other superheroes, exploits the innate human desire for a hero, a good guy, who won't let evil triumph and has the power see that through. Just because governments have subverted that desire to make themselves appear the hero (see the crusades, Manifest Destiny, etc) and manipulate the masses does not make Superman a politic tool.
I used to work in residential construction, where through the contracting of a house only the very largest companies actually do the whole process in house.
We had a small crew who did framing and all the odd jobs to glue all the pieces together. But painting, trimming, electric, HVAC, plumbing, and architectural design all got handed off to a specialist who was paid by the job, and didn't get hired again if he did a crappy job. After a while it became very apparent which guys in town were worth hiring, and they're the ones who got all the jobs on the next projects.
Sure there were problems, but none of this "oh you wanted the walls actually painted? I thought you just wanted a primer" BS that I seem to hear all the time out of computer consulting services.
And, for the most part, people stand by their work. All work is pretty much guaranteed for a year - if it was their crap that broke, they'll fix it free. Only time you have to pay them for extra work is if it's something in their expertise who breakage wasn't their fault.
And when people did screw up horribly (like ending up with two different shades of paint in the same room) they worked overtime for the rest of the week to fix it so we could make our schedule or they didn't get paid for the lousy work! Why doesn't anyone enforce this sort of thing in the CS environment?
Of course, the name and press coverage surrounding it didn't help, I think.
Whenever I told someone I was going to see it, their first reaction was "Isn't that a chick flick?" No one outside the nerdcore had heard of it or had any idea what it was.
I call BS. There are a huge number of small performers who are unknown beyond their local state but still make a perfectly livable wage, including my dad. He quit his job as a producer ten years ago to do what he loved, playing music and performing. He initially signed up with a temp agency to fill the gaps in his schedule.
In ten years, he only went in once.
Now, almost no one outside of Ohio has probably ever heard of Bob Ford the guitar player, but he definitely made enough to support us with it.
They had a few guidelines about writing variable names that make sense, and being consistent with your camel-casing and whatnot, but their biggest and first guideline was this:
Never waste time rewriting someone else's code just because you don't like where they put their braces.
Honestly, a consistent way of naming public interfaces is very helpful, but knowing whether the call is Size() or size() doesn't help you when it's actually called Length(). You're going to have to look at it anyway. But time spent making someone else's code comply to your standard, or to any standard, is time spent not actually fixing what's broken in it.
Of course, everyone in this small company actually wrote decently readable code naturally, or they wouldn't have been hired. Not sure how consistent that is with other workplaces.
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There are quite a few areas (like, say, anywhere >2 miles outside of a suburb) where you can't get cable or DSL. These people still like to watch movies (which is one of the reasons why satellite TV is so big).
But that's just the advantage over internet distribution. No one's talking about the advantages over retail.
How many movies are in an average blockbuster. How many of you have gone there (ok, say five years ago back when you didn't just download it over your university connection) and they didn't have the movie you wanted to watch, or had already rented it?
If you have all of your collection on a hard drive, you can rent it out to everyone at once, no problem. And you can keep WAY more movies available at any one location.
The whole convenience of blockbuster is a good selection (or sometimes just large selection - how much luck do you have finding exactly the awful horror flick your friend recommended to you on p2p in any reasonable amount of time) and short time to get it - yes, it isn't as convenient as netflix or a download if you're planning ahead, but if you just want something to watch TONIGHT, it's a lot easier to stop at a store on your way home than scour p2p or call netflix and wait a day.
I could definitely see my parents (who don't have broadband) using this, and if it were tied into a fully stocked online store/rental (and therefore, I already had a video ipod) I could myself using it, too, when I don't have time to wait for a download.
It's not as good as a full download store for those of us on fat pipes, but a large portion of the country can't or won't get those, and for those people I could see this being quite useful (assuming you made the whole thing so easy to use that they wouldn't be intimidated by it - that'd be the hard part).
Hehe, there's your problem. From my experience in tech support in the labs, elementary educational software has to be some of the WORST written stuff I've ever seen. Sometimes I wonder if they even have a QA department, or if the guy just asks his dog to run it a few times and see if it crashes. They still crash constantly in OS X, the only difference is that they can't bring the whole system down with them any more.
Not to argue too much - you're absolutely right about OS 9 and earlier being crap for stability - no protected memory means any program can bring down the whole system. But edutainment programs.... *cringe*.
I'd say it was more right around the end of the 604e. PowerPC's have almost always been faster than a pentium clock for clock, and for a while apple (and clones) had 300-350 mhz 604e's and 300 mhz G3's while the pentium was at 266-300. There was a significant speed difference.
I'd say they were at least somewhat ahead all the way from the transition to the PPC to when the first athlons came out. Until then, Intel hadn't had any real need to push the speed of their processors too much, and the Motorola and IBM chip devs had managed to stay ahead of them in most counts. Then suddenly the athlon came out, and x86 chips pushed to 1 ghz in almost no time, while at the same time motorola completely stalled on their G4 development (it was originally announced at 500 mhz, wasn't it? Then they couldn't actually make those, and it got dropped to 450 mhz, and it stayed at 450mhz for a long time.
I think that part of apple's whole transition to style over speed came from the fact that, through a situation over which they had little control, they suddenly had a processor that had been stuck at the same mhz for over a year with only marginal improvements in sight. They started running dual G4's in everything, which helped a lot (you think they would have done the extra cost of that, especially BEFORE they had a real multi-tasking OS, if they had a choice?) but still couldn't keep up with a good Athlon in most apps, which are still usually single-threaded and gain nothing from the second processor. Look at the benchmarks from that time period - it becomes very apparent that in general tests that actually use both processors, the dual G4 was about as fast as a good Pentium or Athlon. In the tests that didn't, it was about 2/3 as fast. In the few things that actually used Altivec (if you think it was all marketing hype, you've never tried to run DivX on an old G3 500. A single G4 400 handles it fine), they jumped way ahead.
What this actually translated to, if you were actually using the system instead of just benchmarking it, was that for big multitaskers, the G4 was as good of a workstation as the current PC's. For Apple apps, which all took advantage of Altivec, it was a screaming fast machine. For games, or people who only run one or two apps at a time, it probably sucked compared to their PC at home.
I guess what I'm meaning with all this is that at one time, right before Intel really figured out how to work around the old x86 architecture they've been dragging around for years and AMD suddenly gave them some real competition, Macs were faster than PC's. Since then they've been somewhat slower, but I don't think that's necessarily been a choice that Apple made as much as it was a very bad run of luck.
Quake had a great graphics engine for the time, but what the heck did it innovate in terms of gameplay. you know, the fun factor, the reason you actually buy a game.
I've seen some wonderful engine work come out of id, but the most "innovative" gameplay element I've seen out of them are the decently interactive consoles in Doom 3.
Oh great, now we're contagious, too? It's going to be even harder for fat guys to get laid.
Heh, not sure about the admins, but it's added to your $PATH by default on the systems at my school.
Exactly. The "complaint" is that all these characters love this game, have loved playing their character to 60 in 5 man groups an our or two at a time, and don't want to have to sell their soul to the political back-stabbing of a the huge guild it takes to get anywhere in a raid.
I haven't quite hit it, as I'm only recently 60 and I haven't got through all the high level 5-mans yet. But I can look a month in the future and see that I'm not going to be any closer to raiding MC (because I'm in a guild for the friends, not for phat loot) and I will have thoroughly exhausted any interesting content left to me. I can drop the at that point, sure - in fact, I probably will. But the point of these complaints is that many people play an MMO for the friends, for the groups, for the social aspects. At some point with any game the game itself is going to get old and you have to choose between leaving your friends and being bored by the game. But when the game requires a monthly subscription, it makes you evaluate that tradeoff much more quickly and become much unhappier when you are given nothing new to do for your money.
I think the whole AQ event that they just released is a great idea, and the new 20-man dungeons in ZG and AQ are a good step between a 5-man and a 40-man raid. But I'm pretty disappointed to learn that their next big thing AFTER AQ is another 40-man dungeon. After completing the supposed hardest 5-man instances in the game, I see no reason they couldn't make something of a similar scale but greater difficulty, something that requires the same level of coordination between 5 people as MC does between 40. It still wouldn't be as hard as the 40-man raids, but having participated in some of the ZG boss fights, there is no comparison between them and the toughest fight I have seen in a 5-man instance. There has to be some middle ground, I just wish I had the feeling that they cared at all about reaching for it.
That's because most of the included TTS modules are based almost directly off of military research done in the late 70's and released into the public domain. While more recently there have been a few open source endeavours to improve free TTS, most of the research in that area in the last 20 years has been by corporations that AREN'T MS (like IBM) and kept under strict lock and key or expensive licenses. The text to speech included in Windows and OS X has barely changed in over 20 years. Of course it sounds like crap.
Well, it wouldn't out of the box, but throw a 6600 into it and it would yeah. that's the disgusting thing. It would probably crash every few days randomly, but it would run the games.
A cheap windows box can be had for $400... or you can game on the same hardware you have now with a copy of XP you have lying around from an old machine for... $0. 0 is a lot less than 400.
Just so you have an easier time next time you're on a mac, you can cmd+tab on them, too. Or cmd+~ to switch windows within a single app.
I personally found it confusing to connect buttons and objects in interface builder to backend code compared to .NET. Coming from a windows background its weird and feels like extra steps.
.NET, but it doesn't encourage you to at all, and it results in code that's a lot less neat much of the time. It can end up a little faster for throwing something together, but I honestly like the fact that interface builder encourages decent design that way.
Those few extra steps are good design, a proven way of thinking about data. The data behind a text box should never be linked to the text box itself - what if you suddenly need another box that has to be linked to it? It's part of the model view controller design architecture that separates your data and logic from your display. You can do this in
That's just on the coding side. How I wish visual studio had better auto guides for making interface elements line up or conform to standards. Every time I touch the form builder interface in VS.net it feels like a bloated, uglier version of interface builder. The code's even uglier, too - I can hand edit the code interface builder makes no problem, VS.net puts a giant *do not touch* comment around all of its stuff, and for good reason.
This works so well... until you are at a friend's how and desperately need to access your bank account.
Even if you keep it on a USB key, you've got to have the app on it, too, and they've got to be running an OS that supports it.
Agreed.
I mean, heck, I get ticked off even driving an automatic when it doesn't get the idea that I NEED to accelerate right now, let alone if the car is randomly deciding this based on my location.
Even in ohio, there can easily be 30 minutes of straight roads at 55mph between you and a hospital. Going 75-80 on those (which in many cases, while not entirely safe is not that difficult, either) cuts ten minutes off of your trip. That can make enough of a difference in some circumstances that I'm definitely going to be doing it.
And that isn't even out west, where the time to a major city for treatment could be even worse. Only an idiot would recommend driving like that in New York, or even downtown columbus. But sometimes the middle of nowhere is really empty and far away from hospitals.
Simple: I script at work because that's what my boss wants me to do. I write automation software for testing. Some of these are easier as simple scripts. most of it would have been easier as something in a more full-featured language.
I still found very few instances where it was helpful for me to write another script to help in my development of these. And as a home user (which is where I spend most of my time on a computer) I have found no tasks where I find myself wishing I had written a script for it. There is just so little repetition.
I was not talking about the needs of a production system, where you want to automate as much as possible because very little of it requires any human interaction, but rather my needs as a computer user, which is almost entirely interactive.
Am I the only user in the world who almost never feels a need for a script?
Ok, maybe once a month, I'd like a small one... but almost every other task I do either
A. Will only be done once in that exact order, or
B. Is short enough that it's only one extra click over executing a script.
I'm decently well versed in bash and darn near an expert in vbscript and batch, but I still haven't seen a need to write a single script for my home user needs.
And also, stop subscribing to the 1980's idea that a GUI is only for dumbing things down. A good, POWERFUL GUI makes a lot of command line tasks easier. Are there some things that are still easier to do on the command line? Yes. But which is easier, opening a menu to look for the command you want in a new program and then just using it, or scrolling through twenty man pages to find what you needed? A command line is only faster for the subset of things you already have memorized, and I'd rather spend my time getting my work done than memorizing every switch in grep.
So true.
Anyone who says there isn't design in the construction of a house has never worked construction. You have blueprints, but they're nowhere close to complete. I did at least as much problem-solving and design in that job as I do now as a code-jockey.
The difference is that you are taught standard ways of doing things, and can expect some degree of standardization from what other people are sending you. Every house is different, but they all have similar parts.
As opposed to software, where you have to solve large parts of exactly the same problem with every project (how unique is your web store? It shouldn't be unique at all, just some different names in the database and a different-looking front end. The code for the front end shouldn't even be new, nor should implementing a search be. But it is so many times).
That, I think, is the heart of the problem with subbing a job in CS right now. There isn't enough of an industry standard method of doing things to actually define what "done" is, or what quality is.
I've seen houses built by guys who build the way people code - none of them would pass building codes. Sure, they stand up... but the ceiling's only 6.5 feet tall because the guy who built it for himself was short.
I don't know how many times I've died in an MMO or other game because of this one stupid design flaw.
I was with you on the first part.
Superman isn't a representation of American imperialism, but rather a symbol of the basic stance (which most would consider moral) that someone who has the power to do good, should, that has been manipulated throughout the centuries by power-hungry leadership into empire-building. He, like most other superheroes, exploits the innate human desire for a hero, a good guy, who won't let evil triumph and has the power see that through. Just because governments have subverted that desire to make themselves appear the hero (see the crusades, Manifest Destiny, etc) and manipulate the masses does not make Superman a politic tool.
I'd say it's simple - most comedy writers aren't from Alabama.
I used to work in residential construction, where through the contracting of a house only the very largest companies actually do the whole process in house.
We had a small crew who did framing and all the odd jobs to glue all the pieces together. But painting, trimming, electric, HVAC, plumbing, and architectural design all got handed off to a specialist who was paid by the job, and didn't get hired again if he did a crappy job. After a while it became very apparent which guys in town were worth hiring, and they're the ones who got all the jobs on the next projects.
Sure there were problems, but none of this "oh you wanted the walls actually painted? I thought you just wanted a primer" BS that I seem to hear all the time out of computer consulting services.
And, for the most part, people stand by their work. All work is pretty much guaranteed for a year - if it was their crap that broke, they'll fix it free. Only time you have to pay them for extra work is if it's something in their expertise who breakage wasn't their fault.
And when people did screw up horribly (like ending up with two different shades of paint in the same room) they worked overtime for the rest of the week to fix it so we could make our schedule or they didn't get paid for the lousy work! Why doesn't anyone enforce this sort of thing in the CS environment?
Of course, the name and press coverage surrounding it didn't help, I think.
Whenever I told someone I was going to see it, their first reaction was "Isn't that a chick flick?" No one outside the nerdcore had heard of it or had any idea what it was.
"sufficient to quit their days jobs"
I call BS. There are a huge number of small performers who are unknown beyond their local state but still make a perfectly livable wage, including my dad. He quit his job as a producer ten years ago to do what he loved, playing music and performing. He initially signed up with a temp agency to fill the gaps in his schedule.
In ten years, he only went in once.
Now, almost no one outside of Ohio has probably ever heard of Bob Ford the guitar player, but he definitely made enough to support us with it.
They had a few guidelines about writing variable names that make sense, and being consistent with your camel-casing and whatnot, but their biggest and first guideline was this:
Never waste time rewriting someone else's code just because you don't like where they put their braces.
Honestly, a consistent way of naming public interfaces is very helpful, but knowing whether the call is Size() or size() doesn't help you when it's actually called Length(). You're going to have to look at it anyway. But time spent making someone else's code comply to your standard, or to any standard, is time spent not actually fixing what's broken in it.
Of course, everyone in this small company actually wrote decently readable code naturally, or they wouldn't have been hired. Not sure how consistent that is with other workplaces.