back in the day…

Gerald Weinberg talks about what it was like to be a real programmer:

A San Francisco oil company, which couldn’t accept the coast-to-coast turnaround time, requested an IBM machine of its own (at a cost of roughly $20 million) to run an application that blended oil from its distillation towers everyday. According to Weinberg, performing the blending optimally based on that day’s oil prices was worth about $1 million a day to the company. Weinberg wrote the program for them, because—like nearly all large companies at that time—it didn’t have a programming staff. “When you bought a machine from IBM,” he explained, “you got me with it—free.”

Buying a machine wasn’t a simple proposition, however. “You had to justify to IBM that you were a worthy user,” said Weinberg. “Sure enough, they turned down this order because the [blending] calculation only took less than an hour a day. I found a problem with the program, and by the time I fixed it, it was taking eight hours a day.”

The Economist on MGM v Grokster

The Economist, fresh off their SemaCode scoop, rips in to the music industry’s legal “strategy”:

But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.

useful photography tools

Some handy tips from my friend Dennis:

More software

Articles

In the TidBITS article, the author, Charles, points out a few tools:

Gender Differences in Spoken and Written Communication

Gender Differences in Spoken and Written Communication:

For example, women tend to use more affective markers (e.g., “I know how you feel”), more diminutives (e.g., “little bitty insect”), more hedge words (e.g., perhaps, sort of), more politeness markers (e.g., “I hate to bother you”), and more tag questions (e.g., “We’re leaving at 8:00 pm, aren’t we?”) than do men. Men, on the other hand, are likely to use more referential language (e.g., “The stock market took a nosedive today”), more profanity, and fewer first person pronouns than are women.