Same here. My teachers were very encouraging, from elementary to high-school and on to college. I ended up dropping out of college because my job (in the career I was studying for) became too time demanding.
In this case traffic was quite heavy from all directions. Because of the other intersections (divided highway exits/entrances, two byways on either side, plus a two lane highway ending), I believe that intersection has sensors to determine if the other side of the intersection has space for cars. I think that was that check that failed -- if the light had gone green the other way and someone had moved, it would have caused a blocked interesection.
Really, to have so many intersections in so little space it must have been built before anyone gave any thought to planning for heavy volume. It's amazing how much difference that traffic light tweak made, though. Before, traffic was backed up from 5:00 to 6:30. You could expect to take 40 minutes getting through there. Now it is backed up from 5:05 to 5:10, and again from 5:55 to 6:00.
I've seen a light go green, yellow, green. (Without red.) Needless to say, I checked thoroughly before entering the intersection.
I imagine there are lights somewhere programmed to do this. This one... was not. I saw it happen two or three times in the course of two weeks, then the bug was apparently fixed.
(It was an attempt to clean up half hour waits at an extremely busy series of four intersections within a hundred meters or so. After the bug fix went in, it actually made a BIG difference. I would love to know more about Traffic Light Theory someday...)
I agree on all points. Word is fast, stable, and has tons of features. OpenOffice is ugly and slow as hell on the Mac. I would prefer to use OpenOffice because it has superior file formats, but...
And yes, I know about NeoOffice/J. It's less ugly and less slow, but it needs work to perform as well as Office. I'm looking forward to it.
Luckily, it's fairly easy to change the shortcut keys.
And what's wrong with Carbon? I wouldn't dream of using Cocoa in a new application. Objective C gives a neat demo, but I sure wouldn't want to program in it.
Sometimes it just takes a new set of eyes, right? Besides, if I was a genius I'd have said "halves" instead of "halfs."
One thing that has always confused me is why February is so short. It seems it would make more sense to divide the days a little more logically amongst the months. Right now, quarters are quite uneven... 90 days, 91, 92, 92. Surely a day could be moved from one of the later quarters to make them 91, 91, 92, 91. (I'd take one from the final quarter so that in leap years you don't end up with two long quarters in a row.) There is probably a reason behind it other than just being arbitrary, but I'm not sure what it is.
Although he said it in a rather offensive way (no offense meant to anyway), there is a core point in there that you should consider: Your blog should have a little "Who am I?" blurb.
Don't misunderstand me. He reminded me that I need to write one, too!
Although one thing I did kind of snicker at: "Almost" valid XHTML is lot like like "almost" using birth control. In your case, the document is indeed structurally unsound and not valid XML. You should look into fixing that.
Windows operating systems can and do screw themselves up randomly, but I firmly believe it is only because Windows trusts the hardware it is running on to a greater degree than other operating systems. With proper hardware, it's quite stable. With ANY hardware fault at all, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
Java isn't the first development environment that promises to solve that problem, either. Pascal was originally built to use cross platform bytecode. What was the very first thing people demanded? Native compilers.
A little. To be honest, I found your article to describe at least a possible future accurately. As usual, it was the slashdot spin that was out to lunch: "The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left." There will always be a significant market for real PCs. However, there will certainly be more people using network applications in the future.
I aways ask to see monitors/laptops plugged in first, too. In fact, the only time I forgot to ask was with my POwerbook 12" I bought about a year ago. Just before he rang it in, the dealer suggested I take a look at the screen first. It had no dead pixels.
(No, that wasn't an Apple Store. Just a local dealer.)
Here in the Philippines (I'm staying here for a few months), I've caught a few errors. They really don't care. The most I've ever gotten is an offer to let me return the item on the spot, and there was too much hassle involved. So I just shut up and pay the extra $0.10 CDN or so.
This is major western-style super markets, too, not old world stuff.
One card -- I forget which, I don't use it anymore -- always seemed to count minutes faster than reality. I didn't care enough to time it, I just decided not to buy that card again. I think it was about 45 seconds per "minute."
I agree with you there are alternate methods of getting revenue for a lot of industries. However, none of what you mentioned was a direct rip off and hex editing of someone else's product.
If Compaq had copied the PC BIOS and just changed the copyright notice, that would have been a different matter than reverse-engineering and redesigning it. That would have been nothing more than ripping off someone's work. Instead, by reverse engineering and coming up with a clean room implementation, they did more than enough work to justify it.
Someone could make their product compatible with mine. I probably wouldn't even mind, depending on the product. If it is something that takes money that would otherwise be spent on my product, I would want to stop it, but copyright law certainly isn't the way to do it. I'd compete by making my product better -- something I'm trying to do already, but that would motivate me to work faster and harder.
However, if they were to compete by using a hex editor to change my product's name and modify the way it handles licensing, I would have a much greater problem with that. You think the law is not the answer? Well, maybe not, but the alternative once someone has appropriated that much of your work point is a social one, not a technical one. I'll leave you to guess how extreme that could get -- just consider the budget of some of these companies.
Software is not like music. There are not tens of thousands of failed programmers for every successful one. Rather, there are thousands who work every day of their lives to keep afloat. It is not possible to hex edit a person's name off a song and resell it as your own. In music, there might be a hundred man hours spent on a song. In software, it's more like a hundred thousand. There are hundreds of people who have made lots of money in the music industry; there may be the same in terms of programmers, but it's only from stock options in an unethical company. Once you write a song and record it, it's recorded and the rest is just marketing. Once you write a program, part of marketing is updating it regularly. There are a half dozen companies who end up with all the money in music; okay, maybe the same is true of software, but it is not like they have a monopoly on anything. (The exception is Microsoft, which is only a monopoly because so many people view it as such. That said, if you use Microsoft products, I firmly believe you should pay for them. However, more people need to consider other options.)
Copyright law has stopped me from entering the market. At present, I am one guy with two computers, a Palm Tungsten T3, and a crappy DSL connection. Copyright law makes it possible for me to spend hundreds of hours working on a product and -- if I deliver something good, that people want to use -- get back my investment. If not for copyright law, I might make exactly one sale. At that point -- if the other person was completely self-maximizing -- my name would be removed with a hex editor, and my product resold. Unless I am going to charge that customer the full cost of developing the software, I will lose money on every product I make. Like you said, there are options for musicians. Concerts are a good one -- a lot of musicians make a good percentage of their money at concerts. There's also merchandising, or at least would be if the groups didn't sign away their rights to it. (Although I guess without copyright law, nothing would stop other people from ripping that off.) Are people going to pay me to code in front of them? Are they going to buy a T-shirt?
Yes, leaving the software industry is an option. Frankly, it's a terrific one for all of the programmers who are in the industry because they can make $1 an hour more than their next best choice. I won't miss any of them -- especially the ones who cut code incompetently in one of my products.
The first product I worked on is now entering its 21st year and spawned a hundred copycats, many of which are more successful than it. I don't mind that at all!
The best driver experience I had was with ATi, but that card had a memory problem (I think?) that sometimes required a cold restart for the video to not be scrambled. Convergance? Isn't happening.
Har! What I'm wondering is why you think a product only has one version. This will be the second product out there that I wrote from scratch, and I'm sure I'll need to keep busy updating it for years.
One program I did not write from scratch but took over is now in its twenty-first year, albeit under a new name. It spawned an entire industry. I expect to have to compete with others inspired by the success of my software... I just don't expect to have to compete with my own software that someone hex edited the name on the binary, and is now reselling as theirs.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. My teachers were very encouraging, from elementary to high-school and on to college. I ended up dropping out of college because my job (in the career I was studying for) became too time demanding.
In this case traffic was quite heavy from all directions. Because of the other intersections (divided highway exits/entrances, two byways on either side, plus a two lane highway ending), I believe that intersection has sensors to determine if the other side of the intersection has space for cars. I think that was that check that failed -- if the light had gone green the other way and someone had moved, it would have caused a blocked interesection.
Really, to have so many intersections in so little space it must have been built before anyone gave any thought to planning for heavy volume. It's amazing how much difference that traffic light tweak made, though. Before, traffic was backed up from 5:00 to 6:30. You could expect to take 40 minutes getting through there. Now it is backed up from 5:05 to 5:10, and again from 5:55 to 6:00.
I've seen a light go green, yellow, green. (Without red.) Needless to say, I checked thoroughly before entering the intersection.
I imagine there are lights somewhere programmed to do this. This one... was not. I saw it happen two or three times in the course of two weeks, then the bug was apparently fixed.
(It was an attempt to clean up half hour waits at an extremely busy series of four intersections within a hundred meters or so. After the bug fix went in, it actually made a BIG difference. I would love to know more about Traffic Light Theory someday...)
I made a HyperCard stack that did this. It really is the best way to master the fundamentals... or find out you can't handle them.
Unfortunately, I kept it on a floppy, and it's cooked now.
I agree on all points. Word is fast, stable, and has tons of features. OpenOffice is ugly and slow as hell on the Mac. I would prefer to use OpenOffice because it has superior file formats, but...
And yes, I know about NeoOffice/J. It's less ugly and less slow, but it needs work to perform as well as Office. I'm looking forward to it.
Luckily, it's fairly easy to change the shortcut keys.
And what's wrong with Carbon? I wouldn't dream of using Cocoa in a new application. Objective C gives a neat demo, but I sure wouldn't want to program in it.
Sometimes it just takes a new set of eyes, right? Besides, if I was a genius I'd have said "halves" instead of "halfs."
One thing that has always confused me is why February is so short. It seems it would make more sense to divide the days a little more logically amongst the months. Right now, quarters are quite uneven... 90 days, 91, 92, 92. Surely a day could be moved from one of the later quarters to make them 91, 91, 92, 91. (I'd take one from the final quarter so that in leap years you don't end up with two long quarters in a row.) There is probably a reason behind it other than just being arbitrary, but I'm not sure what it is.
Although he said it in a rather offensive way (no offense meant to anyway), there is a core point in there that you should consider: Your blog should have a little "Who am I?" blurb.
Don't misunderstand me. He reminded me that I need to write one, too!
Although one thing I did kind of snicker at: "Almost" valid XHTML is lot like like "almost" using birth control. In your case, the document is indeed structurally unsound and not valid XML. You should look into fixing that.
Windows operating systems can and do screw themselves up randomly, but I firmly believe it is only because Windows trusts the hardware it is running on to a greater degree than other operating systems. With proper hardware, it's quite stable. With ANY hardware fault at all, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
It doesn't work well because the year is typically divided into thirds, quarters or halfs. 13 is prime.
You know, in the time it took you to post that, you could have easily reread my post.
I did not say network applications were not here. I said they were not replacing all other applications any time soon.
Java isn't the first development environment that promises to solve that problem, either. Pascal was originally built to use cross platform bytecode. What was the very first thing people demanded? Native compilers.
A little. To be honest, I found your article to describe at least a possible future accurately. As usual, it was the slashdot spin that was out to lunch: "The PC as we know it probably only has a decade or so left." There will always be a significant market for real PCs. However, there will certainly be more people using network applications in the future.
Looks like the "the network is the computer" argument again. We're already past the twenty year mark of that prediction, I believe.
Man, when I was young, we used to twiddle the rabbit ears for hours to try to get rid of snow.
I aways ask to see monitors/laptops plugged in first, too. In fact, the only time I forgot to ask was with my POwerbook 12" I bought about a year ago. Just before he rang it in, the dealer suggested I take a look at the screen first. It had no dead pixels.
(No, that wasn't an Apple Store. Just a local dealer.)
Here in the Philippines (I'm staying here for a few months), I've caught a few errors. They really don't care. The most I've ever gotten is an offer to let me return the item on the spot, and there was too much hassle involved. So I just shut up and pay the extra $0.10 CDN or so.
This is major western-style super markets, too, not old world stuff.
"Go Go Gadget Legs!"
I do a long of international long distnace.
One card -- I forget which, I don't use it anymore -- always seemed to count minutes faster than reality. I didn't care enough to time it, I just decided not to buy that card again. I think it was about 45 seconds per "minute."
So they really do that? I thought I was nuts!
I was thinking the same thing with the Warez story when someone thought it seemed unlikely the person was sitting on $50 million in stock.
Oops, a correction: That should read "copyright law has NOT stopped me from entering the market." Blah.
I agree with you there are alternate methods of getting revenue for a lot of industries. However, none of what you mentioned was a direct rip off and hex editing of someone else's product.
If Compaq had copied the PC BIOS and just changed the copyright notice, that would have been a different matter than reverse-engineering and redesigning it. That would have been nothing more than ripping off someone's work. Instead, by reverse engineering and coming up with a clean room implementation, they did more than enough work to justify it.
Someone could make their product compatible with mine. I probably wouldn't even mind, depending on the product. If it is something that takes money that would otherwise be spent on my product, I would want to stop it, but copyright law certainly isn't the way to do it. I'd compete by making my product better -- something I'm trying to do already, but that would motivate me to work faster and harder.
However, if they were to compete by using a hex editor to change my product's name and modify the way it handles licensing, I would have a much greater problem with that. You think the law is not the answer? Well, maybe not, but the alternative once someone has appropriated that much of your work point is a social one, not a technical one. I'll leave you to guess how extreme that could get -- just consider the budget of some of these companies.
Software is not like music. There are not tens of thousands of failed programmers for every successful one. Rather, there are thousands who work every day of their lives to keep afloat. It is not possible to hex edit a person's name off a song and resell it as your own. In music, there might be a hundred man hours spent on a song. In software, it's more like a hundred thousand. There are hundreds of people who have made lots of money in the music industry; there may be the same in terms of programmers, but it's only from stock options in an unethical company. Once you write a song and record it, it's recorded and the rest is just marketing. Once you write a program, part of marketing is updating it regularly. There are a half dozen companies who end up with all the money in music; okay, maybe the same is true of software, but it is not like they have a monopoly on anything. (The exception is Microsoft, which is only a monopoly because so many people view it as such. That said, if you use Microsoft products, I firmly believe you should pay for them. However, more people need to consider other options.)
Copyright law has stopped me from entering the market. At present, I am one guy with two computers, a Palm Tungsten T3, and a crappy DSL connection. Copyright law makes it possible for me to spend hundreds of hours working on a product and -- if I deliver something good, that people want to use -- get back my investment. If not for copyright law, I might make exactly one sale. At that point -- if the other person was completely self-maximizing -- my name would be removed with a hex editor, and my product resold. Unless I am going to charge that customer the full cost of developing the software, I will lose money on every product I make. Like you said, there are options for musicians. Concerts are a good one -- a lot of musicians make a good percentage of their money at concerts. There's also merchandising, or at least would be if the groups didn't sign away their rights to it. (Although I guess without copyright law, nothing would stop other people from ripping that off.) Are people going to pay me to code in front of them? Are they going to buy a T-shirt?
Yes, leaving the software industry is an option. Frankly, it's a terrific one for all of the programmers who are in the industry because they can make $1 an hour more than their next best choice. I won't miss any of them -- especially the ones who cut code incompetently in one of my products.
The first product I worked on is now entering its 21st year and spawned a hundred copycats, many of which are more successful than it. I don't mind that at all!
The best driver experience I had was with ATi, but that card had a memory problem (I think?) that sometimes required a cold restart for the video to not be scrambled. Convergance? Isn't happening.
Dude, you beat me to it. :)
Bacon every morning! Droooool...
Har! What I'm wondering is why you think a product only has one version. This will be the second product out there that I wrote from scratch, and I'm sure I'll need to keep busy updating it for years.
One program I did not write from scratch but took over is now in its twenty-first year, albeit under a new name. It spawned an entire industry. I expect to have to compete with others inspired by the success of my software... I just don't expect to have to compete with my own software that someone hex edited the name on the binary, and is now reselling as theirs.