Thanks for your comment. I agree with you (and roundsquare) that the first point has problems. To give you some idea of what I was getting at:
The way I, and I suspect most gamers, play adventure games is to:
a.) Run through the room graph as far as possible, do everything obvious, and take everything that isn't nailed down
b.) Look at the list of "roadblocks" encountered, and figure out how to get past them
c.) On passing a "roadblock", go to (a.)
To my way of thinking, anything you can grab without solving a puzzle is as good as in your inventory, even if it's in a different part of the room graph.
The post was inspired by Saturday's playthrough of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" - one of the few Infocom games I hadn't spoiled for myself in my youth, due to Activision's decision to omit it from the "Lost Treasures" collections. Anyway, at one point I was faced with this set of puzzles:
1.) How to get past Thorbast in space
2.) How to get past the ion beam
3.) How to get into the orphanage
4.) How to turn the enchanted frog into a princess
5.) How to capture the mouse
6.) How to get the headlight in Cleveland
I was stuck - it seemed that I needed something "extra" to solve any one of these puzzles. In fact 20-YEAR-OLD-SPOILER-ALERT every puzzle on that list can be solved as soon as you encounter it (assuming that you've previously grabbed everything that was lying around in plain sight) with the very possible and partial exception of (4.).
(BTW, how could that list of puzzles not make anyone want to play that game?)
Sort of. It would be at least as accurate to say that the UAW wants the US gov't to hand over $25B (or $50B, or $75B) to the big 3 s.t. all 4 entities (Ford, GM, Chrysler, UAW) can carry on with business more-or-less as usual, and stay out of bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 would likely mean bad things for the UAW.
It seems (and, of course, w/o seeing the books, it's awful hard to tell) that the big 3 just can't make money - despite making some pretty nice cars - due to labor costs that are perhaps 150% of market, and a bloated dealer infrastructure that can't be trimmed due to franchising laws. Plus, a lot of b------t mandates (CAFE, etc.) to make products people don't really want.
The Detroit bailout isn't about saving the jobs of the executive teams (who can always get other jobs, and hell, who tend to be highly incentivised to stick around through Chapter 11) or saving the US manufacturing base (it's not like all those factories will go poof overnight, or all those cars will stop being built and sold) or avoiding shocks to the economy, or preserving shareholder value (which has already been largely wiped out). It's about propping up an uncompetitive cost structure in order to serve special interests, with a side-order of do-gooder power-tripping meddling.
And none of it has a g-----n thing to do with how the big 3 CEOs travel around the country.
Sorry about the rant. But the idea that the unions are gonna get all huffy about the private jet angle, or indeed that this is some sort of "suits-vs.-line-employees" drama strikes me as wrong-headed; if the bailout doesn't happen, no one is going to be more unhappy than the UAW.
I recently looked at the bandwidth costs of S3 vs. traditional hosting, and found them less than compelling; in particular, they seemed much higher than those of shared hosting providers. EC2 has the same bandwidth pricing structure as S3, so I bet you can do better, especially since 500 isn't that large of a number.
Could you elaborate on this a little bit? The passive/active divide is a little fuzzy to me, especially since you apparently include "subscription fees from web apps" in the "passive" category. It seems to me that such fees will either be taxed as ordinary income (if they're coming into a pass-through entity such as an S-corp or some LLCs) or 'double-taxed', first at a corporate rate, and then at a 2nd personal rate when you transfer them from the company to yourself. (The combined effective tax rate generally seems higher than the pass-through rate.)
I can see the lower effective rate being justified a couple of ways: considering the effects of FICA/Medicare taxes, restricting consideration to cap gains (e.g. appreciation in publicly-traded stocks) or tax-free securities, etc. But I'd be interested in where you draw the line between "earned" and "passive" income, and how you conclude that "passive" is taxed at a "much" lower rate.
"The routines in your code should be treated like tiny, highly polished diamonds, each one more exquisitely polished and finely cut than the next."
This makes no sense. Each routine can't be more exquisitely polished than the others. And if you try to make it make sense by interpreting 'next' strictly, to mean 'next in sequence', then it means your functions should get worse as development proceeds. Even if you replace 'next' with 'last', to try to turn it into a semi-coherent statement ("Each routine you write should be the best routine you've ever written") it's still bad advice: You should spend your time on the important questions, and not every function is equally important.
In my view, if you're going to do a business on your own, you have to be focused. Between the other parts of life that need some attention, the care-and-feeding of the business, sales, marketing, and promotion, there isn't that much time left for actual development. So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people. This sounds like what you're doing with your "consulting only, no development" approach to most clients.
In my case, the project I just finished prototyping (yes, this is a plug/request for feedback, although the product is of extremely limited interest to this community) solves a narrow problem in the electricity industry: Energy meter data is passed around in an obscure binary file format (MDEF) that few people can understand, read, or troubleshoot when they receive a broken file from a 3rd party. There's a need for a tool to wrangle this format, and I believe I can do one that's better and cheaper than anything out there, with a modest effort.
As for why I'm a solopreneur: I didn't know any good co-founder candidates, and didn't have a compelling sales pitch. ("Hey - let's quit our jobs, and poke around for a product that we can try to build into a successful business" is a little too honest!) I also didn't want any more of my life to drain away writing vbScript (long, long, long story) and, as the great Peter Gibbons put it: "I don't think I'd like another job".
I'm not philosophically opposed to growing the company, but it will have to be from a "given this problem, I need more people" angle, rather than a "let's enlarge the team, and hope something good happens" view.
Bray's conclusion, as I understand it, is that there is no "Web OS". I think he's wrong, because he's not looking in the right place.
"OS"es started as collections of low-level utility code that helped apps run on particular pieces of hardware. Code that loaded programs, provided low-level I/O services (Bray bags on the primitiveness of OS services, but they're much better than talking to h/w devices directly), helped with memory management, and so on.
The web doesn't really have hardware, but it definitely needs abstractions and utility code. So I'd say the "Web OS" is something like Mochikit, or Dojo, or Prototype, or any other big honking JS framework that abstracts away client-side nastiness.
At any rate, that seems the part of the "Web" that's most analogous to a traditional OS, and something usefully modeled as such.
Mesh abstracts devices and operating systems into objects that can be coordinated and orchestrated to deliver the appearance of a single or composite device. That’s the guiding principle behind virtualization, which permits applications to address these virtual devices as single entities while spreading computational load across machines, domains, and business processes.
I didn't much agree with this guy's post, but here's where he really lost me:
"Javascript is on the verge of becoming part of the assembly language family, and toolkits like GWT are making sure that this will happen before too many developers join the pool of low level language victims. I'm sure you can relate to that stigma."
In the first place, JS is a neat little language that, with a few (okay, a lot) more libraries could easily serve as a replacement for Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Categorizing it as 'low level' or 'assembly' -like seems like a terrific mistake.
In the second place, the assumption that someone would rather work with Java/GWT than JS seems a little provincial. His point seems to be that he would rather code Java than JS, GWT makes that possible so .... everyone will use the tools he prefers. I think there's a flaw in there, somewhere.
In the third place, what 'stigma' is associated with the 'assembly language family', and/or what makes someone a 'victim' of a 'low level' language? Everything has its place, and while it's only rarely useful, a background in ASM is an excellent foundation for a programmer's knowledge. ASM is also useful for solving the occasional nasty bug, understanding security vulnerabilities, working with bytecode, and reverse engineering for fun and profit.
The third point may be minor, but it really poisons the whole article, for me.
"This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age."
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.
My guess is that people in this glorious new age will continue to be, by turns, noble, venal, kind, warlike, selfish, generous, stupid, wise, thoughtful and ignorant, and that life will go on much as it always has.
I find it hard to believe that this discovery/invention (as opposed to, say, the transistor, fission, the steam engine, the telegraph, quantum mechanics, et-bloody-cetera) is really going to alter the human experience for all time.
We will, however, have smaller iPods. And this is a cool discovery.
From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer. I'd guess not; I think this stuff will be used to make faster/smaller versions of what we already have, in much the same way the last 30 years of advances in processor design were used to make really fast IA instruction set chips. If I'm wrong, though, it'll be interesting learning how to program the things.
It's a pretty good/quick overview of how all the bits of Ajax (JS, the DOM, XHR, Markup, etc.) work together, along with brief, functional examples. Should get you orientated in a hurry, then you can dive into the various topics as needed.
"What was it like to quit your job in February? Were you ready before you decided or did you become ready once you decided?"
I made my decision back in October, and gave notice then. I was in my cube, an email with a busywork task popped into my inbox, and I knew right then that it was time to go. (I had been preparing for years, however, saving money and keeping expenses low.)
I think your idea of relocating to a lower-cost country is intriguing. Moving can be disruptive, though, so you want to make sure the additional time you get (through a lower cost of living) isn't all eaten up with the distractions of travel.
2.) No. (I usually apply, though.)
3.) No. (Doesn't seem like a good use of time to try.)
4.) http://www.fairoakslabs.com/iknowpeople/ or http://itunes.apple.com/app/iknowpeople/id349918351?mt=8