Well, somehow in Europe mass transportation managed to survive. And we have suburbs too.
Most American cities are young. Much younger than the Erie Canal or the B&O Railroad. The compression of Manhattan was always the exception. Most looked out on vast expanses of open land.
The distance between New York and Chicago is 712 miles, 1145 km.
Chicago to New Orleans, 832 miles, 1340 km. Chicago to Denver 916 miles, 1474 km. Chicago to San Francisco, 1852 miles, 2981 km.
The American city was always in some sense a tight little island. Not everyone likes living on an island.
The Dymaxion was a 20 foot long tricycle, steered by its single rear wheel.
The second and third Dymaxion car had a rear view periscope. No rear window.
Fuller tested 22 different kinds of steering posts. The car always had a problem with shuddering from side to side, especially in wind, and he had been working on different ways to fix the problem. When Fuller had the car, he rolled it with his family in it. They were injured but recovered--the car had seatbelts. Because of this accident, it was modified, and there are pictures of it with different detailing.3d model of the dymaxion car
It has always been easy to build a lightweight aerodynamic car that delivers extraordinary speed or mileage - at least on the test track. The practical, all-weather, road-worthy, family car is much tougher problem.
Maintaining the streetcar systems instead of dismantling them and not incentivizing suburbanization would've been a better idea than some stupid jet car
There is a lot of nonsense tossed about the decline of the streetcar.
Suburbanization begins with the commuter ferry, the bridge, the tunnel and the railroad.
You don't build the bridge to Brooklyn unless the traffic demands it.
The streetcar lines and suburban electric rail - "light rail lines" - were in deep financial trouble before World War I.
The joke at the time was that the Ford was cheaper per mile than a good pair of boots. You had portal-to-portal service. Room for four passengers, the family dog, and a week's worth of groceries from the new A&P.
The Ford came first. The paved road outside the city limits often much, much later.
If you want to know what drove suburbanization, don't look at GM, look at the telephone and rural electrification, Burpee Seeds, the supermarket and the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
Sears in the late teens and twenties would sell you a kit home at 6% interest that would cost maybe a third less than conventional construction. There is a handsome surviving example not four blocks from where I live.
It's not hard to see the appeal for any middle class family.
All this time, the LibreOffice contributors have been waiting for the foundation, assigning their (costly) code contributions to SUN, and watching how SUN released his propietary version using their (costly) code contributions
I was under the impression that Star Office was OpenOffice.org with Sun's proprietary contributions:
Proprietary components Several font metric compatible Unicode TrueType fonts containing bitmap representations for better appearance at smaller font sizes Twelve Western fonts (including Andale Sans, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, Broadway, Garamond, Imprint MT Shadow, Kidprint, Palace Script, Sheffield) and seven Asian language fonts (including support for the Hong Kong Supplementary character set)
I would add here that font designs are not trivial. It is not a common skill. The Garamond family of fonts can be traced back to 1540 and is the work of perhaps a half dozen or so significant designers.
Adabas D database StarOffice-only templates and sample documents A large clip-art gallery
Sorting functionality for Asian versions File-import filters for additional older word-processing formats (including EBCDIC, DisplayWrite, MultiMate, PFS Write, WordStar, WordStar 2000, and XyWrite (conversion filters licensed from MasterSoft)) A different spell checker (note that OpenOffice.org includes a spell checker as well) and thesaurus StarOffice Configuration Manager Macro Converter for converting Microsoft Office VBA macros to StarOffice Basic
For StarOffice Enterprise Edition only: Professional Analysis Wizard Wizard to create Microsoft Installer Transformation files.
There are also differences in the documentation, training and support options, and some minor differences in the look and icons between Oracle Open Office and OpenOffice.org. Other differences are that StarOffice only supports 12 languages, compared to over 110 for OpenOffice.org.Oracle OpenOffice
I was also under the impression that Sun had invested about $200 million in StarOffice in an attempt to drive it towards becoming a competitive cross-platform office suite - and that Sun remained the primary source for OpenOffice.org funding, staff, management, and resources of every kind ---
and that, in fact, contributions of outside developers to OpenOffice.org through most its history have been quite trivial.
I predict within six months "OpenOffice" will be dead and "LibreOffice" (or similar community-owned fork) will have supplanted it.
LibreOffice is in beta. LibreOffice is on hold.
"This beta release is not intended for production use! Be advised that the current beta might replace your OpenOffice.org installation." LibreOffice Productivity Suite
The fork does not sell a core productivity app to your boss.
It suggests to him, among many other things, the possibility of further fragmentation and more bad blood.
The "similiar community-owned fork."
Linux has a 0.85% global share of the client. iOS tops Linux. The numbers are no better when you look at a breakdown by countries and regions. Stat Counter Global Stats
If Oracle chooses, it is strongly positioned to keep OpenOffice.org dominant in the OSX and Windows markets, assuming "dominance" means anything in an environment where MS Office is so strong.
The New York Daily News [1919] didn't die with the death of Joseph Medill Patterson. The Daily Mail [1896] wasn't buried with Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, in 1922.
It would appear that "The Great Man" theory of history is revived whenever it is convenient.
There is a lot of criticism in the comments - for instance: Hardware mfgs won't go for this Consumers won't care There aren't enough people who _do_ care to make a difference Some of this may be true, stark reality. But if that's the case, then I ask, what do we do instead?
First, an observation:
It has been two days and a search of Google News returns all of four hits for this story.
A search of Google News for the "iPad" restricted to October 14-16 returns about 32,000 hits.
A lot of us feel strongly that the rise of constrained, "walled garden" computing, especially in mobile devices (phones, iPad, etc.) is a Bad Thing(tm).
There is no answer unless you begin by asking what makes the "walled garden" so succeessful. Why the mind share and market share of "GNU/Linux" in the consumer market space continues to erode.
Protection against lock-in is something employers understand the value of.
It is quite possible in the real world that only a single vendor will have the technical competence and material resources to develop and maintain a particularly complex FOSS project.
The names may change but the result is the name. You are free of Microsoft but dependent on Google.
That is really quite an achievement when you look at the free "Office Web" apps and the many discounts available for Office home and student use: Take Office Home! for only $9.95
---- and it is a practical, real-world, validation of the Ribbon UI, whether the geek is willing to admit it or not.
But the geek spends far too much time praising the virtues of OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice as a stand-alone office suite. Where Microsoft excels - if you will excuse the pun - is in the development of integrated office solutions that scale to an enterprise of any size.
Fearing lawsuits and consumer backlash over health risks, the VR Headset never made it to market and neither did the truth about the dangers of prolonged exposure to 3D virtual environments - until now.
The military use of virtual environments - imcluding motion simulators - is not the same as consumer tech. It is not even the same as the amusement park thrill ride.
For a "hackable" Linux as a client-side OS the year has really been something of a downer. The "OtherOS" is gone from the PS3 and only the geek seems to have noticed. Ubuntu has its Netbook Edition, but the netbook platform itself seems to be headed South.
Whatever Android and Chrome may become, they are almost certainly going to be more Google than Geek. In mid October of 2010 that may not be quite as cheering a prospect as it looked in 2008. Sony HDTVs To Come With Google TV Interface
I wonder if there'll be some lawsuit about unfairly bundling the service with the TV, which caused the cable/satellite TV industry to shrivel at long last?
You mean like Netflix has been bundled with virtually every piece of home theater hardware sold with an Ethernet connection?
Lawyers are legalized crooks, news at 11. The world would be a better place without them. The fact that we need specialized professions to be able to properly navigate the legal system is, well, downright stupid
The geek typically doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
State and Federal jurisdiction.
Probable cause. The burden of proof. The presumption of innocence, The admissibility of evidence.
His notion of "plausible deniability" is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would embarass a Hans Reiser.
He is a stout believer in jury nullification.
Which - historically - is far more likely to let loose the good old boys - and send the outsiders to the gallows.
If something is obvious to an expert in the field, then it shouldn't be patentable.
A patent is awarded for a clearly described and working implementation of an idea. It isn't enough to say - in a vague sort of way - that the idea alone seems obvious enough in retrospect.
Only about 10% of the bailout money actually went to building things America needs rather than maintaining the illusion of prosperity in a number of states.
And your source for this stat is to be found --- where?
Imagine if the federal government had spent all $700B on infrastructure development
It takes time.
Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1922, the Reclamation Service presented a report calling for the development of a dam on the Colorado for flood control and electric power generation. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium called Six Companies, Inc., which began construction on the dam in early 1931. Such a large concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques were unproven. The torrid summer weather and the lack of facilities near the site also presented difficulties. Nevertheless, Six Companies turned over the dam to the federal government on March 1, 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.Hoover Dam
To which the sane person would ask why they are not trying to standardize the standards so that toilet seats didn't have to have new molds made to replace them.
Because the toilet, holding tank, etc., had to be designed for whatever space it could be fitted in?
Because no one expected the aircraft to remain in service for 25 years?
That's what happened with Alexander Graham Bell, who in all likelihood invented the telephone after Elisha Gray - and both of them came after Antonio Meucci, who couldn't afford the fee to keep his patent current.
Elisha Gray was the audience while Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia in July 1876.
Gray was no stranger to self promotion.
He was an electrical engineer with a national reputation and a lucrative portfolio of some seventy patents. This is guy who co-founded Western Electric. The guy who would later go on to invent an early and commercially successful "fax machine," the Telautograph.
The first Bell telephone exchange opened in Hartford, Connecticut in January, 1878. By 1882 this single exchange had gone through two stages of expansion to become Southern New England telephone.
If Gray had a working telephone in 1876, what the hell was he doing with it?
The answer to this riddle is that - like all the others who had grown up with Western Union - he probably thought all he had in his hand was a plaything.
Bell was the outsider. Bell was disruptive.
An investigating committee established by the British Parliament found Edison's work on the electric light "unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men." Edison himself thought his phonograph "not of any commercial value." The renowned British physicist Lord Kelvin announced in 1897 that "radio has no future." A decade later a business executive told radio pioneer Lee De Forest that he could put in a single room "all the radiotelephone apparatus that the country will ever need." De Forest himself announced in 1926 that, "while theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." So it goes: Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, our ancestors have made fools of themselves. We always laugh at the electrical toy; van Gogh never sells his paintings; Melville always dies unrecognized. The only safe prediction is that people will go on making dumb predictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, somehow in Europe mass transportation managed to survive. And we have suburbs too.
Most American cities are young. Much younger than the Erie Canal or the B&O Railroad. The compression of Manhattan was always the exception. Most looked out on vast expanses of open land.
The distance between New York and Chicago is 712 miles, 1145 km.
Chicago to New Orleans, 832 miles, 1340 km. Chicago to Denver 916 miles, 1474 km. Chicago to San Francisco, 1852 miles, 2981 km.
The American city was always in some sense a tight little island. Not everyone likes living on an island.
This project isn't forked to create a better version, though, it's forked so that it doesn't depend on a gang of absolute scumbags.
That isn't much of a selling point in Oracle's enterprise market.
The geek could stand to be a little more economical in his use of words like "scumbag."
The Dymaxion was a 20 foot long tricycle, steered by its single rear wheel.
The second and third Dymaxion car had a rear view periscope. No rear window.
Fuller tested 22 different kinds of steering posts. The car always had a problem with shuddering from side to side, especially in wind, and he had been working on different ways to fix the problem.
When Fuller had the car, he rolled it with his family in it. They were injured but recovered--the car had seatbelts. Because of this accident, it was modified, and there are pictures of it with different detailing. 3d model of the dymaxion car
It has always been easy to build a lightweight aerodynamic car that delivers extraordinary speed or mileage - at least on the test track. The practical, all-weather, road-worthy, family car is much tougher problem.
Maintaining the streetcar systems instead of dismantling them and not incentivizing suburbanization would've been a better idea than some stupid jet car
There is a lot of nonsense tossed about the decline of the streetcar.
Suburbanization begins with the commuter ferry, the bridge, the tunnel and the railroad.
You don't build the bridge to Brooklyn unless the traffic demands it.
The streetcar lines and suburban electric rail - "light rail lines" - were in deep financial trouble before World War I.
The joke at the time was that the Ford was cheaper per mile than a good pair of boots. You had portal-to-portal service. Room for four passengers, the family dog, and a week's worth of groceries from the new A&P.
The Ford came first. The paved road outside the city limits often much, much later.
If you want to know what drove suburbanization, don't look at GM, look at the telephone and rural electrification, Burpee Seeds, the supermarket and the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
Sears in the late teens and twenties would sell you a kit home at 6% interest that would cost maybe a third less than conventional construction. There is a handsome surviving example not four blocks from where I live.
It's not hard to see the appeal for any middle class family.
All this time, the LibreOffice contributors have been waiting for the foundation, assigning their (costly) code contributions to SUN, and watching how SUN released his propietary version using their (costly) code contributions
I was under the impression that Star Office was OpenOffice.org with Sun's proprietary contributions:
Proprietary components Several font metric compatible Unicode TrueType fonts containing bitmap representations for better appearance at smaller font sizes
Twelve Western fonts (including Andale Sans, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, Broadway, Garamond, Imprint MT Shadow, Kidprint, Palace Script, Sheffield) and seven Asian language fonts (including support for the Hong Kong Supplementary character set)
I would add here that font designs are not trivial. It is not a common skill. The Garamond family of fonts can be traced back to 1540 and is the work of perhaps a half dozen or so significant designers.
Adabas D database
StarOffice-only templates and sample documents
A large clip-art gallery
Sorting functionality for Asian versions
File-import filters for additional older word-processing formats (including EBCDIC, DisplayWrite, MultiMate, PFS Write, WordStar, WordStar 2000, and XyWrite (conversion filters licensed from MasterSoft))
A different spell checker (note that OpenOffice.org includes a spell checker as well) and thesaurus
StarOffice Configuration Manager
Macro Converter for converting Microsoft Office VBA macros to StarOffice Basic
For StarOffice Enterprise Edition only :
Professional Analysis Wizard
Wizard to create Microsoft Installer Transformation files.
There are also differences in the documentation, training and support options, and some minor differences in the look and icons between Oracle Open Office and OpenOffice.org.
Other differences are that StarOffice only supports 12 languages, compared to over 110 for OpenOffice.org. Oracle OpenOffice
I was also under the impression that Sun had invested about $200 million in StarOffice in an attempt to drive it towards becoming a competitive cross-platform office suite - and that Sun remained the primary source for OpenOffice.org funding, staff, management, and resources of every kind ---
and that, in fact, contributions of outside developers to OpenOffice.org through most its history have been quite trivial.
I predict within six months "OpenOffice" will be dead and "LibreOffice" (or similar community-owned fork) will have supplanted it.
LibreOffice is in beta. LibreOffice is on hold.
"This beta release is not intended for production use! Be advised that the current beta might replace your OpenOffice.org installation." LibreOffice Productivity Suite
The fork does not sell a core productivity app to your boss.
It suggests to him, among many other things, the possibility of further fragmentation and more bad blood.
The "similiar community-owned fork."
Linux has a 0.85% global share of the client. iOS tops Linux. The numbers are no better when you look at a breakdown by countries and regions. Stat Counter Global Stats
If Oracle chooses, it is strongly positioned to keep OpenOffice.org dominant in the OSX and Windows markets, assuming "dominance" means anything in an environment where MS Office is so strong.
Rupert Murdoch is 79. He can't live forever.
The New York Daily News [1919] didn't die with the death of Joseph Medill Patterson. The Daily Mail [1896] wasn't buried with Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, in 1922.
It would appear that "The Great Man" theory of history is revived whenever it is convenient.
There is a lot of criticism in the comments - for instance: Hardware mfgs won't go for this
Consumers won't care
There aren't enough people who _do_ care to make a difference
Some of this may be true, stark reality. But if that's the case, then I ask, what do we do instead?
First, an observation:
It has been two days and a search of Google News returns all of four hits for this story.
A search of Google News for the "iPad" restricted to October 14-16 returns about 32,000 hits.
A lot of us feel strongly that the rise of constrained, "walled garden" computing, especially in mobile devices (phones, iPad, etc.) is a Bad Thing(tm).
There is no answer unless you begin by asking what makes the "walled garden" so succeessful. Why the mind share and market share of "GNU/Linux" in the consumer market space continues to erode.
worst case scenario - there is no change and status quo remains
The worst case scenario is that the FSF plays to an empty house --- again.
Remember last year's campus frolic on the lawn of the Boston Commons? "Windows 7 Sins."
No, they are quite clear its about freedom of the *users*, not everyone.
You do realize how utterly incompressible that statement is to anyone who doesn't read Slashdot?
Protection against lock-in is something employers understand the value of.
It is quite possible in the real world that only a single vendor will have the technical competence and material resources to develop and maintain a particularly complex FOSS project.
The names may change but the result is the name. You are free of Microsoft but dependent on Google.
MS Office targets the office manager and the clerical worker.
The features that work for them are what sell the product - and it sells very, very, well even at retail.
In the top 25 software bestsellers at Amazon.com, versions of MS Office rank 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, and 17.
No. 1 is the 3 seat version of Office Home 2010. No. 3 is the 3 seat Win 7 Upgrade Family Pack.
No. 27 iWork '09. No. 41 iWork '09 Family pack.
Bestsellers In Software
That is really quite an achievement when you look at the free "Office Web" apps and the many discounts available for Office home and student use: Take Office Home! for only $9.95
---- and it is a practical, real-world, validation of the Ribbon UI, whether the geek is willing to admit it or not.
But the geek spends far too much time praising the virtues of OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice as a stand-alone office suite. Where Microsoft excels - if you will excuse the pun - is in the development of integrated office solutions that scale to an enterprise of any size.
as soon as they can come up with more content that is not just more monster chiller horror theater they might have a chance.
I seem to remember that the party line here not so many years back was that HDTV would never take off.
That analog broadcast or the DVD was "good enough."
Tech doesn't just happen.
It takes someone to make it happen.
The first RCA color TV sets had an aborted launch in 1954.
The vacuumn tube tech for a successful home receiver wasn't quite there it - and very expensive.
Sarnoff, RCA, and NBC carried the torch for color for ten years before seeing any return on their investment:
Bonanza 1959
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color 1961
Star Trek 1965
1965 is the year when NBC went to an "all color" prime time schedule.
It would be 1972 before more than half of US households had a color television set.
Fearing lawsuits and consumer backlash over health risks, the VR Headset never made it to market and neither did the truth about the dangers of prolonged exposure to 3D virtual environments - until now.
The military use of virtual environments - imcluding motion simulators - is not the same as consumer tech. It is not even the same as the amusement park thrill ride.
Man, I remember when Slashdot use to be a tech and open source news and tech discussion forum. Can't believe it has transformed into an Apple fanblog.
The success stories in the consumer market space this year have been the iOS in mobile devices, OSX and Windows 7 on the desktop. Trend for 'iOS,Android', iOS tops Linux, StatCounter Global Stats
For a "hackable" Linux as a client-side OS the year has really been something of a downer. The "OtherOS" is gone from the PS3 and only the geek seems to have noticed. Ubuntu has its Netbook Edition, but the netbook platform itself seems to be headed South.
Whatever Android and Chrome may become, they are almost certainly going to be more Google than Geek. In mid October of 2010 that may not be quite as cheering a prospect as it looked in 2008. Sony HDTVs To Come With Google TV Interface
Sounds like it's designed to make Linux look better than Windows and Mac OS X by breaking their numbers down.
It scarcely matters one way or the other.
StatCounter Global Stats, iOS tops Linux
I wonder if there'll be some lawsuit about unfairly bundling the service with the TV, which caused the cable/satellite TV industry to shrivel at long last?
You mean like Netflix has been bundled with virtually every piece of home theater hardware sold with an Ethernet connection?
You need to figure out why they would want to make copies of something you don't want them to, and solve that problem.
"Why?" is a trivially easy question to answer.
The "why" is ego, money, power or revenge.
You could be the Batman. But more likely you are the Joker. Your boss doesn't give a damn one way or the other.
He solves the problem through psychological testing and a deep background check - before the hire.
Every post to Slashdot, every appearance you made on Facebook or YouTube gets vetted.
He solves the problem by video surveillance that begins from the moment you pull into the parking lot.
He solves the problem by shit-canning the first goof-off caught smuggling a laptop, camera or smartphone past the front lobby.
The geek typically doesn't understand the most basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
State and Federal jurisdiction.
Probable cause. The burden of proof. The presumption of innocence, The admissibility of evidence.
His notion of "plausible deniability" is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would embarass a Hans Reiser.
He is a stout believer in jury nullification.
Which - historically - is far more likely to let loose the good old boys - and send the outsiders to the gallows.
If something is obvious to an expert in the field, then it shouldn't be patentable.
A patent is awarded for a clearly described and working implementation of an idea. It isn't enough to say - in a vague sort of way - that the idea alone seems obvious enough in retrospect.
Only about 10% of the bailout money actually went to building things America needs rather than maintaining the illusion of prosperity in a number of states.
And your source for this stat is to be found --- where?
Imagine if the federal government had spent all $700B on infrastructure development
It takes time.
Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1922, the Reclamation Service presented a report calling for the development of a dam on the Colorado for flood control and electric power generation. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium called Six Companies, Inc., which began construction on the dam in early 1931. Such a large concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques were unproven. The torrid summer weather and the lack of facilities near the site also presented difficulties. Nevertheless, Six Companies turned over the dam to the federal government on March 1, 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule. Hoover Dam
The only dissenting opinion you ever see here is by Adobe-suite 'developers' grown indulgent by Adobe's motherly coddling and embrace.
---- and the developers who know who to use Flash and Adobe's development tools effectively:
Machinarium
To which the sane person would ask why they are not trying to standardize the standards so that toilet seats didn't have to have new molds made to replace them.
Because the toilet, holding tank, etc., had to be designed for whatever space it could be fitted in?
Because no one expected the aircraft to remain in service for 25 years?
It's arguments like this that trouble me.
That's what happened with Alexander Graham Bell, who in all likelihood invented the telephone after Elisha Gray - and both of them came after Antonio Meucci, who couldn't afford the fee to keep his patent current.
Elisha Gray was the audience while Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial World's Fair in Philadelphia in July 1876.
Gray was no stranger to self promotion.
He was an electrical engineer with a national reputation and a lucrative portfolio of some seventy patents. This is guy who co-founded Western Electric. The guy who would later go on to invent an early and commercially successful "fax machine," the Telautograph.
The first Bell telephone exchange opened in Hartford, Connecticut in January, 1878. By 1882 this single exchange had gone through two stages of expansion to become Southern New England telephone.
If Gray had a working telephone in 1876, what the hell was he doing with it?
The answer to this riddle is that - like all the others who had grown up with Western Union - he probably thought all he had in his hand was a plaything.
Bell was the outsider. Bell was disruptive.
An investigating committee established by the British Parliament found Edison's work on the electric light "unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men." Edison himself thought his phonograph "not of any commercial value."
The renowned British physicist Lord Kelvin announced in 1897 that "radio has no future." A decade later a business executive told radio pioneer Lee De Forest that he could put in a single room "all the radiotelephone apparatus that the country will ever need." De Forest himself announced in 1926 that, "while theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
So it goes: Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, our ancestors have made fools of themselves. We always laugh at the electrical toy; van Gogh never sells his paintings; Melville always dies unrecognized. The only safe prediction is that people will go on making dumb predictions.
Hindsight, Foresight, and No Sight
they've also seen their share price wibble along going nowhere while Apple's streaks upwards.
Apple has known lean years and fat years.
But nothing can break you more quickly than a crash in the high end of the consumer market.
Streaks end. Bubbles burst.