Long, long before OS X was a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye, Apple had an operating system called A/UX. I think it might have been BSD-based, but I'm not real sure.
A number of posts have mentioned that Apple is certified by the Open Group. I would think that the certification is for A/UX, not OS X.
It ran a patched version of the regular (system 7) Mac OS as a normal Unix process - so all of your classic Mac applications all ran together in one process, in one memory space, much like the regular classic Mac OS. But then you could have command-line Unix processes too. There was also Mac X, a rather nice X server, so you could run Unix X11 applications on A/UX as Unix processes, and display them in Mac X, which was a Mac OS application.
I beta tested A/UX 2.0 when I was a QA engineer at Apple in 1989 and 1990. I was testing the regular version of MacTCP, but was helping out the A/UX QA people who were testing the A/UX version of MacTCP that was really a shim over Berkeley sockets.
I believe A/UX 1.0 didn't have a Mac OS GUI at all. I think you could run a native X server on it.
Interestingly, they didn't use to have an installer of any sort. The way you obtained A/UX was to purchase it preinstalled on a SCSI hard drive. At work at Apple, we would duplicate installations by using dd to copy the whole hard drive to another drive.
I never had the sense that Apple as a whole ever took A/UX very seriously. For example, I was frustrated that A/UX wasn't really that great as a Unix platform, while not considering using it to run Mac OS.
It annoyed me no end that virtual memory page 0 in the Mac OS process wasn't unmapped - you could read and write nil pointers without error. That was done so buggy Mac applications wouldn't crash, but I felt that having an unmapped page 0 was the whole point to running a protected-mode OS on the Mac, to aid software development.
I also wanted Unix command-line tools for developing Mac OS applications. I thought it very silly to use the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop to develop Mac OS software on A/UX - it was a command-line tool in a GUI environment. I wanted to use Emacs and Unix make. I asked about this at the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference one year and they looked at me like I had nine heads.
I think the reason Apple developed A/UX at all was to satisfy government procurement requirements that required POSIX certification - that's the same reason Windows NT has a POSIX box, not because Microsoft ever expected anyone to actually use it.
My understanding is that these days a Unix certification requires a whole bunch of things that neither Mac OS X nor any Open Source clone of Unix could satisfy - for example, Motif, and not just an open source clone like Lesstif.
Finally, the I/O architecture of Mac OS X doesn't bear much resemblance to Unix. For example, while there are special files in/dev, the files are created dynamically when hardware is discovered and deleted when the hardware is unloaded. You have to discover the filenames using a procedure based on Microsoft COM, as described in Apple's document
Accessing Hardware from Applications.
That alone makes OS X source code-incompatible with many Unix programs. It's not too hard to port, but the whole point of certification is that porting should be trivial.
A little over a hundred years ago, John J. Chapman gave a commencement address that I found so inspiring that I copied it to my website after I first came across it:
I found it in the dead-tree edition of
The Cluetrain Manifesto, which I think makes the case that the revolution will be networked. However I agree that it won't be taking place on a sanitized, controlled system like AOL, but on the wilds of the real Internet.
And to show that I walk the walk, I invite you to read my recent article, "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" parts
I,
II and
III.
I should have said that I do plan to provide Ogg Vorbis files soon. I'm well aware of Ogg's many advantages. It's just that I haven't had time to deal with it yet, and I felt in the limited time I had to deal with it I could reach more people with MP3.
I strongly support what Xiph.org is trying to accomplish with Ogg and their other formats.
The album consists of me playing my compositions for the piano.
You can feel free to share these with your friends, but I would prefer that rather than sharing them with strangers over the Internet, that you link my page from your own homepage or weblog. That will help others to find out more about me when they download my music.
But I feel it is important to do better. If a company invests thousands of dollars in proprietary software licenses, they're likely to work with the vendor when a problem arises because of the commitment they made when they paid all that money. Linux often does not have this opportunity - it is very often the case that a user will judge the whole system based on their experience with a single $29 CD distribution and not give it a second chance if something goes wrong.
I do feel that, despite the best efforts of the desktop environment developers to write quality products, Linux is not ready for the desktop of the regular user. I know this from my experience working in technical support and specifically working to fix the problems with my parent's Macintosh whenever I visit them - the slightest little problem stops them cold. I think Linux has gained acceptance in the server market in large part because server users are typically programmers or experienced administrators and therefore have greater technical skills than the typical desktop user and are willing and able to deal with a problem when one arises.
When my mom encounters a problem with her computer, I can't ask her to download, apply and compile a patch. It's best if the problem doesn't occur in the first place.
Perhaps you would find it helpful to read some of the
articles:
One of my favorite doctored photos of all time was the picture of Hilary Clinton as a leather-clad dominatrix (a pretty sexy one at that) on the cover of Spy Magazine.
A google search for "hilary clinton" "spy magazine" dominatrix turned up
this page which has the photo (unfortunately a poor copy) and a discussion of how it was done.
The page goes on to say:
This issue of Spy sold more copies than any other in the magazine's history.
I would like to have a cell phone to allow my consulting clients to reach me when I'm away from my office, but I have heard so many horror stories about cell service it is hard to know who to subscribe to.
If I knew that I could keep my number if I changed providers, I would feel much less reluctant about getting cell service at all.
The cell carriers are saying that this will cause them a lot of losses, but you have to realize that there is no net loss when someone changes carriers. The only ones who lose out are the ones who provide inferior service.
I predict there will be a net gain as the last few Americans who are waiting to get cell phone service sign up.
I personally prefer using the CodeWarrior IDE text editor on Windows (even when I'm not compiling with CodeWarrior) but I have GNU Emacs on my Win2k box and use it from time to time.
You may be interested to read
Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations. I didn't write it, it's a 103 year old commencement address. I have it on my website, and linked prominently all around there, because I feel that the advice it gives is the right way to live.
You may also be interested to read
my resignation from Live Picture after they announced they were moving the company from Santa Cruz County to Silicon Valley.
Having both these pages on my consulting business' website might well be losing me some business. I'll never know - if a potential client thinks I'm a troublemaker after reading them and decides not to hire me, they just click away from my site and never say anything to me.
However, one of the reasons why I am self-employed is so that I can live in a way that is true to my conscience, which was never really fully possible when I worked for corporations.
Also I feel that I'm doing a valuable public service. For example, I can tell from my server logs that many of the people who find my resignation on search engines are looking for examples of resignation letters, I imagine so they can figure out how to write one of their own. I'm glad that I'm able to be helpful that way.
A number of the other responses say that one should only make a moral stand if you have money in the bank, or if you have another job lined up. Certainly not having those things will make your decision more difficult, but I should point out that history is full of courageous people who took moral stands despite knowing full well the terrible consequences that would befall them. We all, as a society, would be better off if more people would do that, but it would come at the cost of much sufferring for a few brave individuals.
I can't say it's been easy being a consultant the last couple years, and I'm pretty sure those pages have made it harder for me. But I think it's the right thing to do. Money is tight but I'm sure I'll manage one way or another. At least I am able to make peace with my conscience by doing such things.
Here's a couple other things I wrote to check out while you're at it:
There's not a whole lot to do here. They roll up the sidewalks at 5 pm.
I have a choice of two bookstores with a decent technical selection, Barnes & Noble in Augusta, 40 minutes away, or Borders in Portland, 2 hours away.
There would be more to do if I lived near one of the cities (there's also Bangor, where Steven King lives) but in Portland at least the housing is much more expensive.
There are a couple nice cafes in Rockland where you can get espresso and stuff. The owner of The Second Read actually graduated from UC Santa Cruz back in the 60's. But The Second Read closes at 5:30 pm. When we asked why they don't stay open later they told us it's because they can't get anyone to work in the evenings.
But you know I'm this california hacker guy. Sometimes when the second read opens at 7 am I come in for a coffee, not because I'm up early but because I'm still up from hacking all night or hanging out/. and k5.
All the good Mainers are up at dawn. My neighbors go to bed at 9 pm.
I think many of the folks stuck in Silicon Valley would get along better economically if they moved elsewhere. But wherever you go, it's not as likely to be such an interesting place.
I long for the days when I used to browse in the Computer Literacy Bookstore and hang out with my friends in all the cafes on Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall.
The other problem is that it's colder than a witch's tit during the winter. This winter has been particularly bad. Money's been tight and heating oil is expensive, so we haven't been able to keep the house as warm as we like.
The icing on the cake is that it's hotter than Hades during the summer. It's just not right after these cold winters. Bonita can hardly stand it. One reason I was looking at moving to California is that I wanted to go back to the mild climate.
I used to live in Santa Cruz, California, over the low mountains to the southwest of silicon valley.
When I moved to Newfoundland in the spring of 2000 to get married to my Canadian wife, I was paying $1275 a month to live in a 2 bedroom house with a one car garage and a tiny front yard. It was half of a duplex.
I'd lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years, but I didn't plan to return because the place had got so crowded. I could afford the rent at the time, but what really got me down was that it would take over an hour to drive across town between 3 and 6 in the afternoon. Coming home after work on highway 17 from the valley was maddening - and the main reason I became a consultant, so I could work out of my home.
After our wedding, we decided it would be best to be back in the US but Bonita wanted to live near her friends and family. We decided to buy a house in Maine.
Neither of us had ever been to Maine before we came house hunting. We picked the mid-coast Rockland area out of a tourist handbook.
We ended up with a four bedroom house with an oversized 2 car garage (it has 3 small rooms to the side) on nearly 2 acres of wooded land.
And how much does it cost me? Prepare to puke. The mortgage is $799 a month.
I think the loan officer was a little taken aback at this dot-commer from california coming and wanting a loan to buy what is a pretty upscale house for the area. But from my point of view, it was dirt cheap.
Things got a lot harder for us after the collapse. Many times we've wondered whether we did the right thing to buy a house, and to be away from Silicon Valley.
But only one of my clients have been from the valley since the collapse, and I have saved enough money from what I used to pay in rent on my old squalid hut to pay back the thousands of dollars that it cost to get a moving company to bring our stuff here. (We had it all in storage while we were living in newfoundland.)
I do OK because I work as a consultant for remote clients. There's not a lot of software here, mostly big-company IT stuff. There are a couple of chip plants in South Portland (Fairchild and National Semiconductor.)
I recently had a job interview where I would have had to move back to California. I'd been thinking of giving up consulting.
Before the interview I used a spreadsheet to calculate the salary I would ask for, adjusting the money I made last year upwards to account for the higher housing prices in the Bay Area.
When we discussed the salary, I explained that my request was based on the higher housing prices out there, and I told my interviewers what I paid for a mortgage out here. I planned to rent a considerably more modest place if I took the job.
They were pretty taken aback when I gave them the number. They said it was far more than they could pay, and that they had lots of candidates who would work for much less.
So I guess I'm going to continue being a consultant from Maine.
I feel really bad for everyone who's stuck in the Bay Area still paying those exhorbitant housing prices. Being out of work with a $2k/month rent bill just has to suck.
I probably wouldn't have made it through the last couple years if I hadn't moved to Maine.
I wrote it in late October 2000, as the meltdown had already begun to happen but before I had become fully aware of it. I came to a deep understanding of the depth of trouble we were all in when I was out of work the following month, and passed the time by emailing a few thousand resumes without getting any response.
You may be interested to know that IRS regulations for financial record keeping only allow you to keep them on a computer if there is a way to produce paper hardcopy versions of the records.
It's been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion that the product activation will fail if you reconfigure your computer. That would prevent you from producing a hardcopy later on. I think its unreasonable to expect that no one's going to reconfigure their computer in the time that you're required to keep your records, and so I assert that Intuit is marketing a product that violates IRS regulations.
I think the computer records rule may only apply to businesses, but that would mean that it would apply to non-corporate business owners who file a schedule C with their personal return.
I own QuickBooks 99 and Quicken 2000, and I've purchased TurboTax for a couple tax years. Allow me to explain why I've stopped using TurboTax, and have never upgraded QuickBooks or Quicken.
The whole time I've had anything to do with Intuit's products, they have been trying to nickel and dime me to death. I guess I'm smarter than the average Quicken user and anyway it pissed me off enough that I wasn't willing to give in.
Let me count the ways.
With the online banking available for Quicken and Quickbooks, there is a monthly fee. Web banking at all three of the banks I've used since the web has been around has been free.
Quicken comes with tax tables that it will use to calculate payroll withholding, but the tax tables expire after a few months. To get updates to the tax tables, you have to pay for a subscription.
But the information in the tax tables is made available for free by the IRS and each state tax agency, and in fact is printed and mailed to business owners each year at taxpayer expense.
Yet there is no facility for manually entering the tax tables or importing tax table files that could reasonably be downloaded for free off the net.
My business has only one employee (myself) so what I do is work out my withholding in a spreadsheet. I've found that doing the calculation this way helps me understand my taxes better when I'm deciding what to pay myself each time. Fortunately QuickBooks allows me to enter the withholding manually - I wouldn't be suprise if they remove that in the future.
They're constantly trying to sell you preprinted checks and invoice forms. You should be able to print nice invoices from QuickBooks on an inkjet printer without using preprinted forms, but there is no facility for designing the invoices. So what I usually do is type up an invoice and email it to my clients; if they want a hardcopy I use a wordprocessor. That works out for me because I don't invoice clients very frequently - it wouldn't work for a retail store.
If you reinstall Quickbooks after reinstalling your OS or move it to a new machine, you have to reactivate the product. My copy of Quickbooks doesn't have the horrible activation scheme this article is about, but what is a pain is that after activating it a couple times, you're told that the product is in use and it won't reactivate. You have to call tech support to get a code to reactivate it.
Fortunately I now have this code written down so I can reactivate it myself. But you know, I paid for the product, I should be able to use it without registering it. They have my damn money.
The last straw for me was that earlier this year, Intuit canceled support for QuickBooks 99's online banking. I got spammed with upgrade notices every time I logged on before this happened. After it happened I canceled my online banking and now I just use the web banking.
I have come to the conclusion that online banking like Quicken and Quickbooks have is just not that good an idea. The whole time I've used both products I have had trouble with my accounts not balancing right. Now that I reconcile my accounts manually with my bank statements, and so am much more careful about it than the supposedly convenient online banking, I have been able to get my books to balance exactly.
I used TurboTax a couple times. I didn't like it the first time I used it, but I used it a second year because I was out of the country and wanted to file online.
First, I think it's pretty damn useless. To handle the schedule C, business income, it asks such meaningful questions as "enter your business expenses" - but you have to figure that out yourself without using turbotax. It's just as easy to enter it on a paper form.
Last year my taxes were much more complicated because I now own a house and so am itemizing deductions, but I found that while doing my taxes by hand, without using software, I was able to claim a deduction that saved significant money. Turbotax would never have found that deduction.
(What I did was have my corporation pay rent to me personally for rental of my home office. But I would have to pay taxes on the rental income. What I was able to do was to depreciate the portion of my home used for business purposes. The maximum depreciation allowed was the business income on the property - which was the total amount of the rent. So I was able to pay myself the home office rental tax-free, I won't have to pay taxes on the rent for decades. The IRS had no complaint about this. Turbotax wouldn't have been able to deal with it.)
I just plain feel that it's wrong for a software publisher to require me to activate a product before I can use it, and so I will never knowingly purchase a software product that requires it. That means I'm never going to install Windows XP. Also I'm never going to install service pack 3 on my Win2k box, because of the EULA.
Finally, I'd like to suggest that if any of you work for companies that have staff attorneys, that you suggest to the attorneys that they require attorney approval of EULAs before any software gets installed. If enough companies start doing that, the current nonsense that passes for a license agreement will get set straight pretty quick - imagine if General Motors wasn't willing to use Windows because their staff attorneys objected to the license agreement!
Like a good slashdotter I sent a helpful note to pater@slashdot.org as the server error page instructed.
I heard recently/. has a million users. How many do you suppose emailed pater? How much space do you suppose is on the filesystem where pater's mailbox lives?
I bought the first edition just before going to visit my parents for Christmas. I read the book at their house.
At the time I was thinking of going into security consulting. I thought it would be best to really study up.
They live near Portland, Oregon, which is the home of the famous Powells bookstore, and Powells Technical Books, probably the best technical bookstore in the world. It's worth visiting Portland just to go to Powell's technical books.
So on a visit to the bookstore I bought a copy of 2600 just to see what the bad guys were up to. You know, so I'd be a better security expert.
Well, this got my parents really worried. They thought I was going to start cracking people's boxes. My mother, in a very frightened tone of voice, asked me to promise never to do that. I don't think they really believed that I was trying to learn about it so I could do a better job as a consultant.
Considering that the government can now force bookstores to reveal book purchases without either a search warrant or your knowledge, I would suggest purchasing the book (and any security books) from a brick & mortar bookstore, and paying cash.
If my mother thought I was studying it so I could become 31337, imagine what John Ashcroft might think.
Many of my pages show up in the first page of Google's results for relevant search terms, sometimes even being the number one result. For example, lately
a google search for software consultant resume lists my resume as the #1 search result. (Your search results may vary.)
I didn't pay a search engine optimization service to make this happen. I didn't use any tricks like "doors" either. It cost me no money, but it did take time and hard work to achieve it.
... then end users will soon need 5 GB of installed RAM to read their email, surf the web and edit their letters.
As fast as the hardware engineers struggle to keep up with Moore's law, shoddy programmers backed by cheapskate management labor to set the performance gains back.
Slashdot Mirror
"He's an attorney! Burn him!"
A number of posts have mentioned that Apple is certified by the Open Group. I would think that the certification is for A/UX, not OS X.
It ran a patched version of the regular (system 7) Mac OS as a normal Unix process - so all of your classic Mac applications all ran together in one process, in one memory space, much like the regular classic Mac OS. But then you could have command-line Unix processes too. There was also Mac X, a rather nice X server, so you could run Unix X11 applications on A/UX as Unix processes, and display them in Mac X, which was a Mac OS application.
I beta tested A/UX 2.0 when I was a QA engineer at Apple in 1989 and 1990. I was testing the regular version of MacTCP, but was helping out the A/UX QA people who were testing the A/UX version of MacTCP that was really a shim over Berkeley sockets.
I believe A/UX 1.0 didn't have a Mac OS GUI at all. I think you could run a native X server on it.
Interestingly, they didn't use to have an installer of any sort. The way you obtained A/UX was to purchase it preinstalled on a SCSI hard drive. At work at Apple, we would duplicate installations by using dd to copy the whole hard drive to another drive.
I never had the sense that Apple as a whole ever took A/UX very seriously. For example, I was frustrated that A/UX wasn't really that great as a Unix platform, while not considering using it to run Mac OS.
It annoyed me no end that virtual memory page 0 in the Mac OS process wasn't unmapped - you could read and write nil pointers without error. That was done so buggy Mac applications wouldn't crash, but I felt that having an unmapped page 0 was the whole point to running a protected-mode OS on the Mac, to aid software development.
I also wanted Unix command-line tools for developing Mac OS applications. I thought it very silly to use the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop to develop Mac OS software on A/UX - it was a command-line tool in a GUI environment. I wanted to use Emacs and Unix make. I asked about this at the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference one year and they looked at me like I had nine heads.
I think the reason Apple developed A/UX at all was to satisfy government procurement requirements that required POSIX certification - that's the same reason Windows NT has a POSIX box, not because Microsoft ever expected anyone to actually use it.
My understanding is that these days a Unix certification requires a whole bunch of things that neither Mac OS X nor any Open Source clone of Unix could satisfy - for example, Motif, and not just an open source clone like Lesstif.
Finally, the I/O architecture of Mac OS X doesn't bear much resemblance to Unix. For example, while there are special files in /dev, the files are created dynamically when hardware is discovered and deleted when the hardware is unloaded. You have to discover the filenames using a procedure based on Microsoft COM, as described in Apple's document
Accessing Hardware from Applications.
That alone makes OS X source code-incompatible with many Unix programs. It's not too hard to port, but the whole point of certification is that porting should be trivial.
I'm planning to write a couple more chapters in the next couple weeks, and intend to complete it by the end of the year.
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Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations
I found it in the dead-tree edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which I think makes the case that the revolution will be networked. However I agree that it won't be taking place on a sanitized, controlled system like AOL, but on the wilds of the real Internet.And to show that I walk the walk, I invite you to read my recent article, "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" parts I, II and III.
I strongly support what Xiph.org is trying to accomplish with Ogg and their other formats.
Please feel free to download and share the MP3s for my album:
-
Geometric Visions
The album consists of me playing my compositions for the piano.You can feel free to share these with your friends, but I would prefer that rather than sharing them with strangers over the Internet, that you link my page from your own homepage or weblog. That will help others to find out more about me when they download my music.
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Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
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Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
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Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
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Free Hosting Service HTML Validation Test Page
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Pointers to C++ Member Functions
I welcome articles on how or why to achieve software quality from anyone who might like to submit one.Thank you for your attention.
Try this google search to find more pages about Hillary's appearance on the cover of Spy.
A google search for "hilary clinton" "spy magazine" dominatrix turned up this page which has the photo (unfortunately a poor copy) and a discussion of how it was done.
The page goes on to say:
Yes, I mean you. And not just you computer geeks. Your mom should be using encryption too.
Another page of interest is Is This the America I Love?
Thank you for your attention.
If I knew that I could keep my number if I changed providers, I would feel much less reluctant about getting cell service at all.
The cell carriers are saying that this will cause them a lot of losses, but you have to realize that there is no net loss when someone changes carriers. The only ones who lose out are the ones who provide inferior service.
I predict there will be a net gain as the last few Americans who are waiting to get cell phone service sign up.
You may also be interested to read my pages Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants and GoingWare's Policy on Recruiters.
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Pointers, References and Values
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Properly Managing Memory Returned by transcode() in the Xerces XML Library (really about refactoring)
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Pointers to C++ Member Functions
Thank you for your attention.Read the GNU Emacs FAQ for Windows.
Heck, if they can make Emacs run on VMS, they sure can make it run on Windows.
You may also be interested to read my resignation from Live Picture after they announced they were moving the company from Santa Cruz County to Silicon Valley.
Having both these pages on my consulting business' website might well be losing me some business. I'll never know - if a potential client thinks I'm a troublemaker after reading them and decides not to hire me, they just click away from my site and never say anything to me.
However, one of the reasons why I am self-employed is so that I can live in a way that is true to my conscience, which was never really fully possible when I worked for corporations.
Also I feel that I'm doing a valuable public service. For example, I can tell from my server logs that many of the people who find my resignation on search engines are looking for examples of resignation letters, I imagine so they can figure out how to write one of their own. I'm glad that I'm able to be helpful that way.
A number of the other responses say that one should only make a moral stand if you have money in the bank, or if you have another job lined up. Certainly not having those things will make your decision more difficult, but I should point out that history is full of courageous people who took moral stands despite knowing full well the terrible consequences that would befall them. We all, as a society, would be better off if more people would do that, but it would come at the cost of much sufferring for a few brave individuals.
I can't say it's been easy being a consultant the last couple years, and I'm pretty sure those pages have made it harder for me. But I think it's the right thing to do. Money is tight but I'm sure I'll manage one way or another. At least I am able to make peace with my conscience by doing such things.
Here's a couple other things I wrote to check out while you're at it:
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Is This the America I Love?
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Important Note for Recruiters and Contract Agencies
Thank you for your attention.I have a choice of two bookstores with a decent technical selection, Barnes & Noble in Augusta, 40 minutes away, or Borders in Portland, 2 hours away.
There would be more to do if I lived near one of the cities (there's also Bangor, where Steven King lives) but in Portland at least the housing is much more expensive.
There are a couple nice cafes in Rockland where you can get espresso and stuff. The owner of The Second Read actually graduated from UC Santa Cruz back in the 60's. But The Second Read closes at 5:30 pm. When we asked why they don't stay open later they told us it's because they can't get anyone to work in the evenings.
But you know I'm this california hacker guy. Sometimes when the second read opens at 7 am I come in for a coffee, not because I'm up early but because I'm still up from hacking all night or hanging out /. and k5.
All the good Mainers are up at dawn. My neighbors go to bed at 9 pm.
I think many of the folks stuck in Silicon Valley would get along better economically if they moved elsewhere. But wherever you go, it's not as likely to be such an interesting place.
I long for the days when I used to browse in the Computer Literacy Bookstore and hang out with my friends in all the cafes on Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall.
The other problem is that it's colder than a witch's tit during the winter. This winter has been particularly bad. Money's been tight and heating oil is expensive, so we haven't been able to keep the house as warm as we like.
The icing on the cake is that it's hotter than Hades during the summer. It's just not right after these cold winters. Bonita can hardly stand it. One reason I was looking at moving to California is that I wanted to go back to the mild climate.
When I moved to Newfoundland in the spring of 2000 to get married to my Canadian wife, I was paying $1275 a month to live in a 2 bedroom house with a one car garage and a tiny front yard. It was half of a duplex.
I'd lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years, but I didn't plan to return because the place had got so crowded. I could afford the rent at the time, but what really got me down was that it would take over an hour to drive across town between 3 and 6 in the afternoon. Coming home after work on highway 17 from the valley was maddening - and the main reason I became a consultant, so I could work out of my home.
After our wedding, we decided it would be best to be back in the US but Bonita wanted to live near her friends and family. We decided to buy a house in Maine.
Neither of us had ever been to Maine before we came house hunting. We picked the mid-coast Rockland area out of a tourist handbook.
We ended up with a four bedroom house with an oversized 2 car garage (it has 3 small rooms to the side) on nearly 2 acres of wooded land.
And how much does it cost me? Prepare to puke. The mortgage is $799 a month.
I think the loan officer was a little taken aback at this dot-commer from california coming and wanting a loan to buy what is a pretty upscale house for the area. But from my point of view, it was dirt cheap.
Things got a lot harder for us after the collapse. Many times we've wondered whether we did the right thing to buy a house, and to be away from Silicon Valley.
But only one of my clients have been from the valley since the collapse, and I have saved enough money from what I used to pay in rent on my old squalid hut to pay back the thousands of dollars that it cost to get a moving company to bring our stuff here. (We had it all in storage while we were living in newfoundland.)
I do OK because I work as a consultant for remote clients. There's not a lot of software here, mostly big-company IT stuff. There are a couple of chip plants in South Portland (Fairchild and National Semiconductor.)
I recently had a job interview where I would have had to move back to California. I'd been thinking of giving up consulting.
Before the interview I used a spreadsheet to calculate the salary I would ask for, adjusting the money I made last year upwards to account for the higher housing prices in the Bay Area.
When we discussed the salary, I explained that my request was based on the higher housing prices out there, and I told my interviewers what I paid for a mortgage out here. I planned to rent a considerably more modest place if I took the job.
They were pretty taken aback when I gave them the number. They said it was far more than they could pay, and that they had lots of candidates who would work for much less.
So I guess I'm going to continue being a consultant from Maine.
I feel really bad for everyone who's stuck in the Bay Area still paying those exhorbitant housing prices. Being out of work with a $2k/month rent bill just has to suck.
I probably wouldn't have made it through the last couple years if I hadn't moved to Maine.
I wrote it in late October 2000, as the meltdown had already begun to happen but before I had become fully aware of it. I came to a deep understanding of the depth of trouble we were all in when I was out of work the following month, and passed the time by emailing a few thousand resumes without getting any response.
It's been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion that the product activation will fail if you reconfigure your computer. That would prevent you from producing a hardcopy later on. I think its unreasonable to expect that no one's going to reconfigure their computer in the time that you're required to keep your records, and so I assert that Intuit is marketing a product that violates IRS regulations.
I think the computer records rule may only apply to businesses, but that would mean that it would apply to non-corporate business owners who file a schedule C with their personal return.
The whole time I've had anything to do with Intuit's products, they have been trying to nickel and dime me to death. I guess I'm smarter than the average Quicken user and anyway it pissed me off enough that I wasn't willing to give in.
Let me count the ways.
With the online banking available for Quicken and Quickbooks, there is a monthly fee. Web banking at all three of the banks I've used since the web has been around has been free.
Quicken comes with tax tables that it will use to calculate payroll withholding, but the tax tables expire after a few months. To get updates to the tax tables, you have to pay for a subscription.
But the information in the tax tables is made available for free by the IRS and each state tax agency, and in fact is printed and mailed to business owners each year at taxpayer expense.
Yet there is no facility for manually entering the tax tables or importing tax table files that could reasonably be downloaded for free off the net.
My business has only one employee (myself) so what I do is work out my withholding in a spreadsheet. I've found that doing the calculation this way helps me understand my taxes better when I'm deciding what to pay myself each time. Fortunately QuickBooks allows me to enter the withholding manually - I wouldn't be suprise if they remove that in the future.
They're constantly trying to sell you preprinted checks and invoice forms. You should be able to print nice invoices from QuickBooks on an inkjet printer without using preprinted forms, but there is no facility for designing the invoices. So what I usually do is type up an invoice and email it to my clients; if they want a hardcopy I use a wordprocessor. That works out for me because I don't invoice clients very frequently - it wouldn't work for a retail store.
If you reinstall Quickbooks after reinstalling your OS or move it to a new machine, you have to reactivate the product. My copy of Quickbooks doesn't have the horrible activation scheme this article is about, but what is a pain is that after activating it a couple times, you're told that the product is in use and it won't reactivate. You have to call tech support to get a code to reactivate it.
Fortunately I now have this code written down so I can reactivate it myself. But you know, I paid for the product, I should be able to use it without registering it. They have my damn money.
The last straw for me was that earlier this year, Intuit canceled support for QuickBooks 99's online banking. I got spammed with upgrade notices every time I logged on before this happened. After it happened I canceled my online banking and now I just use the web banking.
I have come to the conclusion that online banking like Quicken and Quickbooks have is just not that good an idea. The whole time I've used both products I have had trouble with my accounts not balancing right. Now that I reconcile my accounts manually with my bank statements, and so am much more careful about it than the supposedly convenient online banking, I have been able to get my books to balance exactly.
I used TurboTax a couple times. I didn't like it the first time I used it, but I used it a second year because I was out of the country and wanted to file online.
First, I think it's pretty damn useless. To handle the schedule C, business income, it asks such meaningful questions as "enter your business expenses" - but you have to figure that out yourself without using turbotax. It's just as easy to enter it on a paper form.
Last year my taxes were much more complicated because I now own a house and so am itemizing deductions, but I found that while doing my taxes by hand, without using software, I was able to claim a deduction that saved significant money. Turbotax would never have found that deduction.
(What I did was have my corporation pay rent to me personally for rental of my home office. But I would have to pay taxes on the rental income. What I was able to do was to depreciate the portion of my home used for business purposes. The maximum depreciation allowed was the business income on the property - which was the total amount of the rent. So I was able to pay myself the home office rental tax-free, I won't have to pay taxes on the rent for decades. The IRS had no complaint about this. Turbotax wouldn't have been able to deal with it.)
I just plain feel that it's wrong for a software publisher to require me to activate a product before I can use it, and so I will never knowingly purchase a software product that requires it. That means I'm never going to install Windows XP. Also I'm never going to install service pack 3 on my Win2k box, because of the EULA.
Finally, I'd like to suggest that if any of you work for companies that have staff attorneys, that you suggest to the attorneys that they require attorney approval of EULAs before any software gets installed. If enough companies start doing that, the current nonsense that passes for a license agreement will get set straight pretty quick - imagine if General Motors wasn't willing to use Windows because their staff attorneys objected to the license agreement!
If you're thinking of buying a technical book, it's well worth your while to check out its ACCU review just in case it turns out to be a stinker.
Here's an example of a "not recommended" review.
here's a "highly recommended" review.
I don't expect that the ACCU will be reviewing works of fiction, but they do reviews on quite a wide variety of subjects and not just C and C++.
The ACCU has some great mailing lists too. If you program in C, C++, C# or Java, you really should join.
I heard recently /. has a million users. How many do you suppose emailed pater? How much space do you suppose is on the filesystem where pater's mailbox lives?
At the time I was thinking of going into security consulting. I thought it would be best to really study up.
They live near Portland, Oregon, which is the home of the famous Powells bookstore, and Powells Technical Books, probably the best technical bookstore in the world. It's worth visiting Portland just to go to Powell's technical books.
So on a visit to the bookstore I bought a copy of 2600 just to see what the bad guys were up to. You know, so I'd be a better security expert.
Well, this got my parents really worried. They thought I was going to start cracking people's boxes. My mother, in a very frightened tone of voice, asked me to promise never to do that. I don't think they really believed that I was trying to learn about it so I could do a better job as a consultant.
Considering that the government can now force bookstores to reveal book purchases without either a search warrant or your knowledge, I would suggest purchasing the book (and any security books) from a brick & mortar bookstore, and paying cash.
If my mother thought I was studying it so I could become 31337, imagine what John Ashcroft might think.
I didn't pay a search engine optimization service to make this happen. I didn't use any tricks like "doors" either. It cost me no money, but it did take time and hard work to achieve it.
I explain everything I did in How To Promote Your Business On the Internet.
What's my secret? No secret at all:
- Put stuff on your site that people find interesting and useful
- Ask people for links, and give them reciprocal links in return.
That's it. But read my article for the full discussion, as well as an explanation of why I'm telling everyone my secret.Other pages I have that you may find helpful are:
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Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants
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Search Engine Submission Form Index
My most popular page is a C++ style guide called Pointers, References and Values.and finally, from my K5 diary, A Webmaster's Strange But True Tale.
Thank you for your attention.
As fast as the hardware engineers struggle to keep up with Moore's law, shoddy programmers backed by cheapskate management labor to set the performance gains back.
Kids these days...