Patents are a non-issue unless you plan on commercializing a solution, and if that is the case, you (or the government) could license what is needed.
How do you find out which patents you've touched upon without paying for lawyers? How do you find the money to license said patents before you've made any money from your product?
If you come up with a commercially viable (i.e. can make money) product or process, angel or VC money can help you get a jump start. In addition, those type of people have been through the process of helping to get patents on whatever unique stuff you bring to the table as well as providing management and negotiating experience should you find that your product or process requires licensing.
Or perhaps your new shiny thing has a very limited potential market (left-handed shrimp farmers, sane tea party members, etc). In that case you might make enough money to provide you and a few others with a nice comfortable living while never rising high enough to be noticed by the trolls. Over the past 24 years, my software product company (with a somewhat limited market) has been hit up by two trolls - one we paid to go away (the "license" fee was cheap), and one we fought (and made go away) because we had a bunch of prior art.
One of the keys to being a successful innovator is to concentrate more on solutions and less on obstacles. If you are a worrier, its probably best to make your mark through excellence in your craft and attention to detail rather than with leaps of imagination. True worriers (such as some accountants, CFO's, and editors I've met) can have real value to the companies they serve and can make significant coin. Not everyone is an Edison.
Having led the Shredder challenge for all of a week or so (the teams killed me:), I can attest that the cash prize offered was (for me) an incredible incentive to come up with a solution. Offering direct prizes for innovative solutions to specific, limited, problems is a great idea and one that can help foster a spirit of inventiveness. Patents are a non-issue unless you plan on commercializing a solution, and if that is the case, you (or the government) could license what is needed.
Take even a cursory look at the inventions produced (and commercialized) by citizens of the United States, and you quickly realize that we created most of the things used in the modern world. It is exactly that spirit of inventiveness that the government should be encouraging to help create new jobs, and a challenge program is a direct and productive way to go about it.
All storage is now so inexpensive it is essentially free. If I really need it, I can afford to buy my own and protect it. The only stuff you ever want to store in the cloud is all the useless crap that would make you slightly nervous to delete, so you throw it into someplace where you hope it will just eventually disappear on its own.
The problem is only peripherally like a jigsaw puzzle. While it is possible to attack certain portions of the assembly problem using automated methods (namely breaking the chads into individually manipulatable pieces and - perhaps - suggesting pieces), the basic problem is serial in nature. In the latter puzzles such as #4 an #5, the primary issues are:
- the chads are offset with respect to one another - the pages have been shredded slightly skewed - the edges are poorly defined - the top and bottom edges often overlap slightly due to the cut/rip angle that chops the strips into chads - the shape of the chads have often been warped during the scanning process
But worst of all, given a particular chad, a human or computer must predict the appearance of the adjacent chad and then find it among thousands of possible candidates. Even after narrowing down the search by categorizing the chads into whatever groups seem useful, you often end up with multiple chads that will *exactly* fit in place. By that I mean that the writing appears - pixel for pixel - to continue onto the next chad. While one would think that human handwriting documents would be highly random, they aren't. We tend to use the same line angles when connecting cursive letters, crossing our t's or other writing gestures and this causes a high degree of commonality in the graphics at the magnified level of the chads at which we are working.
But wait, it gets worse - if you misplace a chad, you have actually created *two* errors in the document - the misplaced chad and the (now missing) chad where it *should* have gone. In a crowd sourced solution with many inexperienced eyes working part-time, it is my opinion that many of these types of errors will be introduced, preventing a solution. For this reason - and for this particular challenge - I think it will actually be won by some masochistic puzzler with some image-manipulation skills.
Macs are hacked less than PCs because Mac owners can afford the lawyers and researchers to come after your ass, while the trailer trash that use PC's can barely scrape up enough money to pay for their porn downloads.
It's not the radiation or the length of time or the fuel that will keep humans from going to Mars - it's the lack of will and funding, combined with the advance of robotics. Has anyone seen the "artists conception" video of the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory that they will be landing on Mars in 2012? As I watched that thing, my jaw dropped lower and lower - if we actually manage to pull this robotic mission off, I'm convinced that we will never personally go there unless someone whips up a magic transporter. Figure it out - one one hand we can send robots to Mars on the (relative) cheap that let us explore, test, examine, and travel to just about anywhere we want to go, and we can keep sending more and more sophisticated bots. Balance the bot strategy with the incredible expense, human suffering, risk, and probability of actually learning anything new of going there personally. On balance, it just ain't worth it. If we can actually build automated spacecraft and rovers that can do what is pictured in that video, then game over. Bots are the way to go. I used to be a strong "send humans to Mars" proponent, but after watching that vid, I humbly admit that our real strength lies in our proven ability to design semi-autonomous spacecraft and incredibly productive bots, and that's the best way to leverage our money. Google for "Mars Science Laboratory Mission Animation".
Yet another misguided attempt by a politician to legislate facts more to their liking. There should be some kind of mechanism by which lawmakers that propose boneheaded crap like this can be swiftly kicked out the door and back into the fantasyland from whence they crawled.
Talking to the current crop of computers seems more than a bit embarrassing to me and always has. It's as if by talking to it, I am somehow telling those within listening range that I am stupid enough to imbue the mindless machine with humanlike properties - as if the computer has *me* fooled but not the other people who are feeling so sorry for me. Strangely, this feeling of embarrassment is present even when I am the only one in the room - as if I were standing outside myself, feeling sorry for the idiot that is treating a machine like a human being.
If computers were actually capable of perfectly emulating a human partner in a conversation, I imagine this feeling of embarrassment would either vanish or at least be greatly diminished. I would, after all, be conversing with what evidently is a human intelligence - if I closed my eyes I could not tell the difference.
But all embarrassment aside, it seems to me that as time goes on, computers and humans have developed incredibly efficient ways of accomplishing non-verbal communication - i.e. a simple click here, and tap of the keyboard there - abbreviated short hand on both input and output that is designed to convey the maximum amount of instruction and information with a minimum of effort. And I just bet that this evolved system of non-verbal man-machine communication is much more efficient that if we were to try to accomplish the same tasks using only verbal interaction.
Apple - being Apple - will continue to concentrate on the overall user experience of their mobile devices. They will retain their reputation as the maker of mercedes-benz smartphones and other consumer goods, but the sheer volume of Android-based competition will eventually swamp them out of the lower-end of the market. Apple could probably care less - Steve and co. are all about the total experience and crafting the perfect device, and that's fine - they can lead the market in innovation and be the brand that everyone aspires to become. But the droid wave must eventually wash over them and absolutely eat their low-end lunch, and since most of the world ain't rich, that mean most of the world is going to be droid-powered, unless Apple can undercut droid prices, and that just isn't how they roll.
Never happen. Long before we need the resources of two earths, the population will start dying off in huge numbers as they starve to death. Its a self-limiting system.
OK, everyone got the Skynet reference which is probably the most well-known and recent and involves computers attempting to destroy humanity (bad computers!).
But how many of you have ever heard of "The Adolescence of P-1" by Thomas J. Ryan. School hacker codes up a cracker tool, gets expelled, improves it, and lets it loose where it gets out of hand. Humans then attempt to destroy now-intelligent and self-protective software program. (bad software! - nice read)
Or even earlier, "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner. Epic hackers creating worms (bad society! - good, but overreaction to the Nixon years)
Or how about when humans actually *want* to turn over the world to a computer, as in "Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. They test the concept by installing it in a space station and then attacking it just to be sure they can turn it off if they really want to (bad idea! - but good book and Hogan at his best)
Those last three were all written in the 70's. Others can likely lengthen this list considerably.
I know for a fact that I've read two previous stories about exactly the same type of thing on slashdot - some bozos tie a camera and a data logger to a helium balloon and launch it 20 miles up, then proceed to chase it around the countryside in hopes of finding it again. I suppose some newbie posted this because of the iPhone angle, but geez, people have been launching these types of near-space balloon-sats for 10-20 years or more. Nuts and Volts magazine regularly has projects for people that do this. While this type of stuff can be technically interesting, reporting a launch is really reaching on a slow news day:-)
This story has negative informational content. RIMM doesn't want a bunch of crappy apps on their platform? Really? Wow. Who would have thought that? Would almost be nice if someone were to inspect the apps before they got posted, huh? Oh wait...
But the majority of users have elected to use that very mechanism, haven't they? Yes, it's overloaded. Yes, it is proprietary. Market share would seem to indicate that it doesn't matter much.
Since the return of Jobs to Apple, they have defined the mass-market consumer computing industry. The iMac redefined how computers can look, introducing the concept of high-design into a buyers decision. The iPod and iTunes defined an easy, safe, legal means for carrying your music around and purchasing it online. The iPod Touch pushed into territory previously occupied by PDAs and showed how applications and music players could co-exist in the same device. The iPhone took the Touch a step further and integrated your cell phone. Finally, the iPad leveraged the phenomenal user interface that Apple engineered for its new portable consumer devices and made the screen large enough to be attractive to use in an armchair at home. And during all this, their computers have made major switches to Intel CPUs and OS X.
Everyone else has been just trying to keep up. It has actually been an incredible accomplishment by Jobs. Say what you will about the man or his methods, but he has completely and authoritatively defined the interaction of humans and their computing devices during his lifetime. Apple deserves the attention.
They're like assholes - everyone claims to have one. The problem is that unless the tablet can read your mind and pinch-hit for your bed-partner, they have to survive in a market that Apple has already defined and captured a substantial lead. Just having a few superior specs ain't gonna be enough - it's going to take really deep marketing pockets in order to overcome the iPad mindshare. Also, half of the tablet announcements we've seen here are pure trial balloons, seeing how the general public might react if they actual built what they say they will build. Until you can buy one, they are all vaporware.
We do scanning and imaging work and called an early product "Pixel Perfect". Oops, wrong name - Word Perfect (bigger at the time than they are now) came down on us like a ton of bricks. To be fair, they weren't total dicks about it, they simply strongly suggested that we find a name that didn't lead people to think this was a product that *they* had put out. We carefully evaluated the likely size of their bank account against the known size of our testicles, and this comparison somehow seemed to open the doors to wisdom and we were able to quickly come up with what we felt was a much better product name:-)
If you got the money and you got the lawyers, you can get what you want. Scrotal size just doesn't enter into the equation much....and truth be told, the only reason we picked Pixel Perfect to begin with was the prior existence of a popular software product that used the word Perfect in its title. Lesson learned. Do your research a pick your product names carefully.
I am absolutely sick of new laws and regulations that do nothing but attempt to protect us from the stupid crap we to which we want to subject ourselves. Endless traffic regulations. Anti-smoking laws. Laws about exactly what we can and cannot snort, drink, smoke, or otherwise consume. Laws about whether the things we wear are flammable. Laws about how many rat turds and insect parts can be in our canned veggies. Laws that try and protect kids from seeing naked people or understanding what any farm kid knows about procreation. Laws about how fast we can go on the road. Laws about how *slow* we can go on the road. Laws about which direction and in what kind of vehicles we can go on the road. Laws about how old and experienced you must be to even think about using the roads. Laws that attempt to control what a woman can and cannot do with her raped and violated body after an attacker has fertilized her. Laws that attempt to prevent our children from learning actual facts about history and evolution and instead want them to learn religious fantasies. Laws that regulate how much crap our industry can pump into the air while our competition manufactures us into oblivion. Laws making it incredibly easy for a single asshole senator to hold up passing laws that might actually be useful, simply because they don't like the color or political party of our elected president. Laws that allow any special interest to pump money into lobbying to buy whatever stupid laws they want.
We have emasculated ourselves. We are dying a slow death of our own making while China eats our lunch and laughs. You look at pictures of happy people working and smiling in factories in this country around 1899 and you think, why in the hell did we do this to ourselves?
I am not inclined to waste much time agonizing over things that will help my replacement do his job better than I did mine. I assumed that the purpose for the "tips" was to help *me* be a better programmer and avoid the mistakes of others. To that end, here's my suggestions, derived from 35 years of experience in the real world:
1. Programmers always bitch about deadlines because they insist on coding to some puritanical design guidelines and attempt to use all the latest features of an OS. I never, ever worried about deadlines and always met them because I trained myself to size my coding efforts to the time available.
2. In the end, when the clock runs out, the *only* thing that counts is whether you have something that works that you can show the client. Excuses will not keep you employed.
3. As you learn new coding techniques in the course of a project, resist the temptation to revisit your earlier code to "clean it up" - at least until you have archived a complete working version of the application. Only then - and only if you have time - should you revisit and improve your code.
4. Never, ever get defensive about your code. There is always someone that can code more stylishly than you or can comment better or knows the API by heart. Instead, accept suggestions with grace, be a good team player when you are part of a team, and concentrate on never missing a deadline. Better to have working ugly code, that be pretty and and a day too late.
5. Always jump at the opportunity to be a part of something new, because you will expand your knowledge, your resume, and (usually) your wallet.
6. If you are a team leader, be generous with your time and knowledge, work one-on-one, and avoid organizing meetings that have no concrete agenda and time limit.
7. Have a life and a hobby that does not involve computers. It is important to be able to decompress.
Took about 40 bytes of RAM, and 2-3 minutes to input via the front panel switches, and was a blast to play. Cycled lights through the 8-bits of output on the IMSAI front panel. Your job? Flicking an input switch ON just as a lit light passed above, the object being to turn it off. Miss and it turns a light ON again. Kill all the lights and you win. My 4-year old daughter has had access to everything including the latest console games on our big screen TV and she still begged me to fire up that game. Still have the IMSAI, still boots to CP/M 2.2 via 8, 5.25, or 3.5 inch floppy, and can still run that 40 byte game.
Dang whippersnappers are spoiled today, I tell ya....
(sigh)... back to programming my 4 core Mac with 6 Gigs of RAM and a terabyte disk.
It occurred to me that many people might not believe we ever landed on the moon because we cannot do it today - and if we were ever able to do this, why would we be so stupid as to throw the ability away?. I wonder what else falls into that category? What other things have we achieved as a nation that we could no longer do without some serious rethinking and lead time?
The absolute best job I ever had was a codebreaker at NSA in the mid 70's when I was with the Army Security Agency. Critical mission, challenging brain-straining job, and the most advanced computers on the planet to play with. Have never been to the museum but imagine it would bring back some memories. Most people immediately think "Oh boy, Enigma!", but that is only the most public of the items, and not necessarily the most interesting. My proudest possession is the Dundee Orange Marmalade jar that I still keep on my desk. You either know what that means, or you don't.
All societies need a certain number of intentionally stupid people (they specifically elect to be so), in order to ensure that the manual labor jobs are adequately covered - i.e. janitors, vegetable pickers, etc. They might as well be from LA. If you elect to raise your children in an atmosphere of superstition rather than teach them how to think, then you must obviously not want them to think for a living, and manual labor is what is left. I'm sure my children will eventually need their septic tank pumped or their house painted, and would be perfectly willing to hire Louisiana residents to do those tasks. Think about it this way - every creationist janitor that is born today will mean a bigger paycheck for your rational, gene-splicing daughter tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents are a non-issue unless you plan on commercializing a solution, and if that is the case, you (or the government) could license what is needed.
How do you find out which patents you've touched upon without paying for lawyers? How do you find the money to license said patents before you've made any money from your product?
If you come up with a commercially viable (i.e. can make money) product or process, angel or VC money can help you get a jump start. In addition, those type of people have been through the process of helping to get patents on whatever unique stuff you bring to the table as well as providing management and negotiating experience should you find that your product or process requires licensing.
Or perhaps your new shiny thing has a very limited potential market (left-handed shrimp farmers, sane tea party members, etc). In that case you might make enough money to provide you and a few others with a nice comfortable living while never rising high enough to be noticed by the trolls. Over the past 24 years, my software product company (with a somewhat limited market) has been hit up by two trolls - one we paid to go away (the "license" fee was cheap), and one we fought (and made go away) because we had a bunch of prior art.
One of the keys to being a successful innovator is to concentrate more on solutions and less on obstacles. If you are a worrier, its probably best to make your mark through excellence in your craft and attention to detail rather than with leaps of imagination. True worriers (such as some accountants, CFO's, and editors I've met) can have real value to the companies they serve and can make significant coin. Not everyone is an Edison.
Having led the Shredder challenge for all of a week or so (the teams killed me :), I can attest that the cash prize offered was (for me) an incredible incentive to come up with a solution. Offering direct prizes for innovative solutions to specific, limited, problems is a great idea and one that can help foster a spirit of inventiveness. Patents are a non-issue unless you plan on commercializing a solution, and if that is the case, you (or the government) could license what is needed.
Take even a cursory look at the inventions produced (and commercialized) by citizens of the United States, and you quickly realize that we created most of the things used in the modern world. It is exactly that spirit of inventiveness that the government should be encouraging to help create new jobs, and a challenge program is a direct and productive way to go about it.
CLOUD =
Cheap
Lumps
Of
Useless
Data
All storage is now so inexpensive it is essentially free. If I really need it, I can afford to buy my own and protect it. The only stuff you ever want to store in the cloud is all the useless crap that would make you slightly nervous to delete, so you throw it into someplace where you hope it will just eventually disappear on its own.
The problem is only peripherally like a jigsaw puzzle. While it is possible to attack certain portions of the assembly problem using automated methods (namely breaking the chads into individually manipulatable pieces and - perhaps - suggesting pieces), the basic problem is serial in nature. In the latter puzzles such as #4 an #5, the primary issues are:
- the chads are offset with respect to one another
- the pages have been shredded slightly skewed
- the edges are poorly defined
- the top and bottom edges often overlap slightly due to the cut/rip angle that chops the strips into chads
- the shape of the chads have often been warped during the scanning process
But worst of all, given a particular chad, a human or computer must predict the appearance of the adjacent chad and then find it among thousands of possible candidates. Even after narrowing down the search by categorizing the chads into whatever groups seem useful, you often end up with multiple chads that will *exactly* fit in place. By that I mean that the writing appears - pixel for pixel - to continue onto the next chad. While one would think that human handwriting documents would be highly random, they aren't. We tend to use the same line angles when connecting cursive letters, crossing our t's or other writing gestures and this causes a high degree of commonality in the graphics at the magnified level of the chads at which we are working.
But wait, it gets worse - if you misplace a chad, you have actually created *two* errors in the document - the misplaced chad and the (now missing) chad where it *should* have gone. In a crowd sourced solution with many inexperienced eyes working part-time, it is my opinion that many of these types of errors will be introduced, preventing a solution. For this reason - and for this particular challenge - I think it will actually be won by some masochistic puzzler with some image-manipulation skills.
Macs are hacked less than PCs because Mac owners can afford the lawyers and researchers to come after your ass, while the trailer trash that use PC's can barely scrape up enough money to pay for their porn downloads.
It's not the radiation or the length of time or the fuel that will keep humans from going to Mars - it's the lack of will and funding, combined with the advance of robotics. Has anyone seen the "artists conception" video of the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory that they will be landing on Mars in 2012? As I watched that thing, my jaw dropped lower and lower - if we actually manage to pull this robotic mission off, I'm convinced that we will never personally go there unless someone whips up a magic transporter. Figure it out - one one hand we can send robots to Mars on the (relative) cheap that let us explore, test, examine, and travel to just about anywhere we want to go, and we can keep sending more and more sophisticated bots. Balance the bot strategy with the incredible expense, human suffering, risk, and probability of actually learning anything new of going there personally. On balance, it just ain't worth it. If we can actually build automated spacecraft and rovers that can do what is pictured in that video, then game over. Bots are the way to go. I used to be a strong "send humans to Mars" proponent, but after watching that vid, I humbly admit that our real strength lies in our proven ability to design semi-autonomous spacecraft and incredibly productive bots, and that's the best way to leverage our money. Google for "Mars Science Laboratory Mission Animation".
Yet another misguided attempt by a politician to legislate facts more to their liking. There should be some kind of mechanism by which lawmakers that propose boneheaded crap like this can be swiftly kicked out the door and back into the fantasyland from whence they crawled.
Talking to the current crop of computers seems more than a bit embarrassing to me and always has. It's as if by talking to it, I am somehow telling those within listening range that I am stupid enough to imbue the mindless machine with humanlike properties - as if the computer has *me* fooled but not the other people who are feeling so sorry for me. Strangely, this feeling of embarrassment is present even when I am the only one in the room - as if I were standing outside myself, feeling sorry for the idiot that is treating a machine like a human being.
If computers were actually capable of perfectly emulating a human partner in a conversation, I imagine this feeling of embarrassment would either vanish or at least be greatly diminished. I would, after all, be conversing with what evidently is a human intelligence - if I closed my eyes I could not tell the difference.
But all embarrassment aside, it seems to me that as time goes on, computers and humans have developed incredibly efficient ways of accomplishing non-verbal communication - i.e. a simple click here, and tap of the keyboard there - abbreviated short hand on both input and output that is designed to convey the maximum amount of instruction and information with a minimum of effort. And I just bet that this evolved system of non-verbal man-machine communication is much more efficient that if we were to try to accomplish the same tasks using only verbal interaction.
They are subminiature USB 4.0 ports. I've got an external terabyte hard drive and a document scanner plugged in right now and both are working great!
Man, you guys really screwed the pooch on this one.
Apple - being Apple - will continue to concentrate on the overall user experience of their mobile devices. They will retain their reputation as the maker of mercedes-benz smartphones and other consumer goods, but the sheer volume of Android-based competition will eventually swamp them out of the lower-end of the market. Apple could probably care less - Steve and co. are all about the total experience and crafting the perfect device, and that's fine - they can lead the market in innovation and be the brand that everyone aspires to become. But the droid wave must eventually wash over them and absolutely eat their low-end lunch, and since most of the world ain't rich, that mean most of the world is going to be droid-powered, unless Apple can undercut droid prices, and that just isn't how they roll.
Never happen. Long before we need the resources of two earths, the population will start dying off in huge numbers as they starve to death. Its a self-limiting system.
OK, everyone got the Skynet reference which is probably the most well-known and recent and involves computers attempting to destroy humanity (bad computers!).
But how many of you have ever heard of "The Adolescence of P-1" by Thomas J. Ryan. School hacker codes up a cracker tool, gets expelled, improves it, and lets it loose where it gets out of hand. Humans then attempt to destroy now-intelligent and self-protective software program. (bad software! - nice read)
Or even earlier, "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner. Epic hackers creating worms (bad society! - good, but overreaction to the Nixon years)
Or how about when humans actually *want* to turn over the world to a computer, as in "Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. They test the concept by installing it in a space station and then attacking it just to be sure they can turn it off if they really want to (bad idea! - but good book and Hogan at his best)
Those last three were all written in the 70's. Others can likely lengthen this list considerably.
Don't go swimming with that battery belt....
I know for a fact that I've read two previous stories about exactly the same type of thing on slashdot - some bozos tie a camera and a data logger to a helium balloon and launch it 20 miles up, then proceed to chase it around the countryside in hopes of finding it again. I suppose some newbie posted this because of the iPhone angle, but geez, people have been launching these types of near-space balloon-sats for 10-20 years or more. Nuts and Volts magazine regularly has projects for people that do this. While this type of stuff can be technically interesting, reporting a launch is really reaching on a slow news day :-)
This story has negative informational content. RIMM doesn't want a bunch of crappy apps on their platform? Really? Wow. Who would have thought that? Would almost be nice if someone were to inspect the apps before they got posted, huh? Oh wait...
> That's a definition we could all do without.
But the majority of users have elected to use that very mechanism, haven't they? Yes, it's overloaded. Yes, it is proprietary. Market share would seem to indicate that it doesn't matter much.
Since the return of Jobs to Apple, they have defined the mass-market consumer computing industry. The iMac redefined how computers can look, introducing the concept of high-design into a buyers decision. The iPod and iTunes defined an easy, safe, legal means for carrying your music around and purchasing it online. The iPod Touch pushed into territory previously occupied by PDAs and showed how applications and music players could co-exist in the same device. The iPhone took the Touch a step further and integrated your cell phone. Finally, the iPad leveraged the phenomenal user interface that Apple engineered for its new portable consumer devices and made the screen large enough to be attractive to use in an armchair at home. And during all this, their computers have made major switches to Intel CPUs and OS X.
Everyone else has been just trying to keep up. It has actually been an incredible accomplishment by Jobs. Say what you will about the man or his methods, but he has completely and authoritatively defined the interaction of humans and their computing devices during his lifetime. Apple deserves the attention.
They're like assholes - everyone claims to have one. The problem is that unless the tablet can read your mind and pinch-hit for your bed-partner, they have to survive in a market that Apple has already defined and captured a substantial lead. Just having a few superior specs ain't gonna be enough - it's going to take really deep marketing pockets in order to overcome the iPad mindshare. Also, half of the tablet announcements we've seen here are pure trial balloons, seeing how the general public might react if they actual built what they say they will build. Until you can buy one, they are all vaporware.
We do scanning and imaging work and called an early product "Pixel Perfect". Oops, wrong name - Word Perfect (bigger at the time than they are now) came down on us like a ton of bricks. To be fair, they weren't total dicks about it, they simply strongly suggested that we find a name that didn't lead people to think this was a product that *they* had put out. We carefully evaluated the likely size of their bank account against the known size of our testicles, and this comparison somehow seemed to open the doors to wisdom and we were able to quickly come up with what we felt was a much better product name :-)
If you got the money and you got the lawyers, you can get what you want. Scrotal size just doesn't enter into the equation much. ...and truth be told, the only reason we picked Pixel Perfect to begin with was the prior existence of a popular software product that used the word Perfect in its title. Lesson learned. Do your research a pick your product names carefully.
I am absolutely sick of new laws and regulations that do nothing but attempt to protect us from the stupid crap we to which we want to subject ourselves. Endless traffic regulations. Anti-smoking laws. Laws about exactly what we can and cannot snort, drink, smoke, or otherwise consume. Laws about whether the things we wear are flammable. Laws about how many rat turds and insect parts can be in our canned veggies. Laws that try and protect kids from seeing naked people or understanding what any farm kid knows about procreation. Laws about how fast we can go on the road. Laws about how *slow* we can go on the road. Laws about which direction and in what kind of vehicles we can go on the road. Laws about how old and experienced you must be to even think about using the roads. Laws that attempt to control what a woman can and cannot do with her raped and violated body after an attacker has fertilized her. Laws that attempt to prevent our children from learning actual facts about history and evolution and instead want them to learn religious fantasies. Laws that regulate how much crap our industry can pump into the air while our competition manufactures us into oblivion. Laws making it incredibly easy for a single asshole senator to hold up passing laws that might actually be useful, simply because they don't like the color or political party of our elected president. Laws that allow any special interest to pump money into lobbying to buy whatever stupid laws they want.
We have emasculated ourselves. We are dying a slow death of our own making while China eats our lunch and laughs. You look at pictures of happy people working and smiling in factories in this country around 1899 and you think, why in the hell did we do this to ourselves?
I am not inclined to waste much time agonizing over things that will help my replacement do his job better than I did mine. I assumed that the purpose for the "tips" was to help *me* be a better programmer and avoid the mistakes of others. To that end, here's my suggestions, derived from 35 years of experience in the real world:
1. Programmers always bitch about deadlines because they insist on coding to some puritanical design guidelines and attempt to use all the latest features of an OS. I never, ever worried about deadlines and always met them because I trained myself to size my coding efforts to the time available.
2. In the end, when the clock runs out, the *only* thing that counts is whether you have something that works that you can show the client. Excuses will not keep you employed.
3. As you learn new coding techniques in the course of a project, resist the temptation to revisit your earlier code to "clean it up" - at least until you have archived a complete working version of the application. Only then - and only if you have time - should you revisit and improve your code.
4. Never, ever get defensive about your code. There is always someone that can code more stylishly than you or can comment better or knows the API by heart. Instead, accept suggestions with grace, be a good team player when you are part of a team, and concentrate on never missing a deadline. Better to have working ugly code, that be pretty and and a day too late.
5. Always jump at the opportunity to be a part of something new, because you will expand your knowledge, your resume, and (usually) your wallet.
6. If you are a team leader, be generous with your time and knowledge, work one-on-one, and avoid organizing meetings that have no concrete agenda and time limit.
7. Have a life and a hobby that does not involve computers. It is important to be able to decompress.
Took about 40 bytes of RAM, and 2-3 minutes to input via the front panel switches, and was a blast to play. Cycled lights through the 8-bits of output on the IMSAI front panel. Your job? Flicking an input switch ON just as a lit light passed above, the object being to turn it off. Miss and it turns a light ON again. Kill all the lights and you win. My 4-year old daughter has had access to everything including the latest console games on our big screen TV and she still begged me to fire up that game. Still have the IMSAI, still boots to CP/M 2.2 via 8, 5.25, or 3.5 inch floppy, and can still run that 40 byte game.
Dang whippersnappers are spoiled today, I tell ya....
(sigh) ... back to programming my 4 core Mac with 6 Gigs of RAM and a terabyte disk.
It occurred to me that many people might not believe we ever landed on the moon because we cannot do it today - and if we were ever able to do this, why would we be so stupid as to throw the ability away?. I wonder what else falls into that category? What other things have we achieved as a nation that we could no longer do without some serious rethinking and lead time?
The absolute best job I ever had was a codebreaker at NSA in the mid 70's when I was with the Army Security Agency. Critical mission, challenging brain-straining job, and the most advanced computers on the planet to play with. Have never been to the museum but imagine it would bring back some memories. Most people immediately think "Oh boy, Enigma!", but that is only the most public of the items, and not necessarily the most interesting. My proudest possession is the Dundee Orange Marmalade jar that I still keep on my desk. You either know what that means, or you don't.
All societies need a certain number of intentionally stupid people (they specifically elect to be so), in order to ensure that the manual labor jobs are adequately covered - i.e. janitors, vegetable pickers, etc. They might as well be from LA. If you elect to raise your children in an atmosphere of superstition rather than teach them how to think, then you must obviously not want them to think for a living, and manual labor is what is left. I'm sure my children will eventually need their septic tank pumped or their house painted, and would be perfectly willing to hire Louisiana residents to do those tasks. Think about it this way - every creationist janitor that is born today will mean a bigger paycheck for your rational, gene-splicing daughter tomorrow.