I love being an engineer. My iPod shuffle was broken. The left audio channel became intermittent, but worked with a bit of constant pressure. What does any good engineer do? break it open, put some solder on the connection and seal it back up!
As good as new.
I love being an engineer.
“Open Letter To Hobbyists” by Bill Gates, 1976:
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
From Coding Horror, today:
I accept that software registration keys are a necessary evil for commercial software, and I resign myself to manually keeping track of them, and keying them in… Furthermore, registration keys are often the user’s first experience with our software– and first impressions matter.
Welcome to the age that thinks software is not the end, but just a means to an end; an end that is something useful to humans: communication, collaboration, creation, perhaps; something more than making someone else pay for something we made for the sole purpose of accomplishing our own goal that costs us zero dollars to give to other people.
Welcome to the age that has advanced itself.
This is disruptive technology. Deal with it.
(P.S. I’m around more often now and starting to contact people.)
Mostly because of things like this:
Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol.
From the paper:
The most obvious feature of this protocol is that it is complicated and
would have taken a long time to carry out. We will advance a hypothesis
as to why it is so complicated, and describe a simplified protocol with
very similar features.
Failures happen; given the 24×7 support requirement (per 4.5), there will be times when something breaks badly enough that senior wizards will have to connect remotely.
- RFC2870, “Root Name Server Operational Requirements”
I just recently spent a few hours diagnosing a very inconsistent network behavior when browsing between websites. I’ve known for a while that it’s probably a DNS issue. After testing, I found that xo.net’s (the bandwidth seller to my ISP) DNS servers are just intermittently dog slow in resolving individual queries, up to 10 seconds a piece.
I demoed using opendns.com’s free resolvers, which indeed are fairly fast, but load my browser with advertising for every domain name typo. Not going to fly.
As a temporary fix instead, I started using local (and my former) universities’ DNS servers, as they’re really quick, reliable, close, and most importantly, wide open to the world. I try to be mindful of using other people’s resources, though, prompting me to ask my coworkers, “Is it ethical to use someone else’s DNS resolver?”
Just today on the NYLUG mailing list was a post about using freely available DNS servers instead of crap ones. Indeed, a list of open DNS servers exists and even conveniently geolocates the closest DNS server. Problem is, the three it suggested for me are also really slow. Where the uni DNS servers are about 20ms away, all three random DNS servers bottomed out at 140ms. It appears that one of them, even, is some guy on an ADSL line.
Which just leads me to believe I should set up my own tinyDNS server and achieve ultimate roundtrip times through tuning. Alas, my router does run dd-wrt, but does not have the necessary memory for yet another service.
Ah the problems a geek faces when he gets home from his day (and, for the last while, night) job.
The following is a list of the RSS items I either need to read or think about more.
One of the supposed amenities of the building where I rent was that a good portion of the building is blanketed by Wi-Fi from a company called Natural Wireless. I figured it was a gimmick at the time I read about it but it turned out to be a really nice perk.
When I moved in, I picked up signal from their AP and I immediately signed up for their service, since a geek without internet service is rendered powerless like Spiderman without his spidey suit. I figured I’d only keep the service until I got a “real” internet service provider (DSL from Verizon or cable from Time Warner; Speakeasy was in the running at one point, but then they were picked up by Best Buy, and I hate that chain more than I hate consumer ISPs).
The day after I signed up, some Natural Wireless guys came to install an access point in my apartment so that I would get a better signal. For a returnable deposit, they also gave me a wireless bridge so that I could connect my networking gear to their network. At first this seemed like a good idea, but there was no encryption between the wireless bridge and the AP, making all of my traffic in the open.
I returned the bridge soon thereafter and lived with the wireless service for a while, re-intending to subscribe to Time Warner’s service, albeit at a higher price.
Then I had an afternoon of annoying phone calls with Time Warner (first they couldn’t locate my apartment number in their system, despite my neighbors being listed; then, they told me I could not get the promotional (better) price and no installation fee, costing me lots of money I don’t think I should have to pay and requiring a week’s wait).
I emailed Natural Wireless with a proposal to install a switch between their network and their AP, and then connecting my own router directly to the switch. I had indicated I was prepared to pay for the additional connectivity.
Ralph responded to me very quickly; not only did they accept my proposal, but were willing to lend me some equipment to do it, and could do the install on the next business day. Best of all: they aren’t charging me anything additional. Even better: Ralph must have picked up on the fact that I’m a geek, dispensed with the customer service-speak, and used acronym-heavy lingo. I really appreciate when customer service reps can speak to the level of their customer.
So now, I have a true and verified 3Mbps down and 3Mbps up, for $26 per month, no contract, and most importantly, no dealing with incompetency at the big ISPs. I’m even thinking of upgrading to their bigger plans ($30/mo for 5Mbps up/down, $45/mo for 10Mbps up/down), because of that last point.
Kudos to Natural Wireless. They’ve made this customer happy.
Some humorous things I’ve seen around the web lately.
Random statistic:
But what about the other 6% of young people? Spawns of the hellbeast, must be.
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You mean software vendors distribute patches to existing installs?
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This is from the website of a new condo building being built in my neighborhood.
“Where SoHo meets Tribeca” ? You must mean Canal St, but don’t want to make people think of Chinatown or hellish traffic.
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Wow. Who ever would have thought?
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For whatever reason, when I visited this website, my mind made an unconscious decision as to what kind of robot I was interested in…
While I’m not an NRA member, friends know that I am the proud owner of two of these babies. It seems some other people have had a similar interest in extremely-non-lethal weapons.
I got excited when I read this because the New York Law School is my neighbor.
At noon Pacific time today (June 18), members of the Peer-to-Patent project team will discuss the project on the New York Law School’s Democracy Island in Second Life.
(emphasis mine)
Sadly, I’m not geeky enough to have an avatar in Second Life.