ska

I presume you meant one way NDA, your overall point is a really good one. Contracts are very useful as a leading indicator of how the counterparty thinks about the relationship.

FWIW professional liability insurance absolutely can make sense, even be necessary when writing software, depending on the nature of the contract and your overall responsibilities.

FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …

>>> In fact, in certain cases it can increase the size instead of compressing.

Fwiw, all (lossless) compression algorithms will increase the size of some inputs.

But also yes. There may be some loss as you describe , but they’ll taste better brought back till room temperature than straight from the fridge .

"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."

I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.

I think the problem runs deeper than that. What you’ve done is an interesting tool for finding out more about a relatively small slice of developers.

Didn’t they just release a small-ish one ?

May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.

This is something Common Lisp got really right.

Sure, there are also cases where it is not needed. But some called out in GP were not typically correct. And often it is opaque to the researchers only because someone did an IRB in an earlier step with usage that covers sharing it with you.

This is correct. IRB will be simple is not the same as not needing one.

Not having to play the game isn’t as expensive as you suggest.

Lots of tech employees, if they don’t let lifestyle inflation take over, hit a point where they could retire early but may not want to. At that point t walking away from a job is much easier.

This is a problem with 'prosumer' gear in general. If camera manufactures bought a transferable commercial license for everything in it, it would be too expense for consumer use, but the people licensing IP to them want a piece if you are making money with it.

Similar to software that is free or low cost for non-commercial use only, even with the same functionality.

The good news is typically nobody will chase you down on this unless you are making real money. The bad news is, once you are, they will.

This is one example of an area where economic incentives make it difficult to shift.

  - There aren't that many people willing to pay for such software, but those that do *really* need it, and will pay quite a bit (passing that cost on of course). 
 
  - The technical domain knowledge needed to do it properly is a barrier to many
 
  - It needs to be pretty robust

As a result, you end up with a small handful of players who provide it. They have little incentive to modernize, and the opportunity cost for a new player high enough to chase most of them off to other avenues.

I think the main way this changes is when someone has already spend the money in an adjacent area, and realized "huh, with a little effort here we could probably eat X's lunch"

Beyond that you at most get toy systems from enthusiasts and grad students (same group?) ...

If that's what you want to do, why would you ever sign a contract saying you won't do it?

You often will not be, explicitly by contract. Honestly in this case it’s easier to keep things clean.

Well deserved!

Oh you’re right about relative size of Mexico - my memory had a units error (km vs mi). Still, it’s not even as big as Canada so the statement wasn’t close to right…. It’s a bit under 9/20

>whose physical presence spans a majority of a major continent,

I take your point, but this part isn't true. Canada is a little larger, and then there is also Mexico which is about 1/2 the size, so US is roughly 2/5ths of North America.

> OTOH, this is more or less how clients themselves expect to be billed

Again, very much depends on the context. Contract engineering that maps roughly to n FTE is often as you suggest, consulting rarely.

The tricky thing about formulas like this is that it is very domain dependent.

What you describe is a reasonable approach for a freelancer who expects to bill most working hours. It falls apart for a lot of consulting scenarios where you bill fewer hours and spend more time generating work. In that case you may be better off setting rates so that e.g. 1000 billed hours will reach your base target salary equivalent...

FWIW I’ve done similar for friends who are on a tight budget , consulting for 1/2, 1/3 1/5 “regular” rate. Sometimes with equity but not always.

I’m nowhere near rich, but when I was consulting full time of I had enough hours to hit my “ok” target for the year, it felt right to be flexible with some of the rest of my time …

Many people generally don't change boards enough, yes. And keeping plastic boards after they are quite deeply grooved is a problem.

If your dishwasher doesn't have a sanitize cycle (or you aren't using it) you may not be getting hot enough at home anyway to be up to the standard a commercial kitchen would need.

Of course you may not have a dishwasher at all.

Food safety. It's ironic that in a home setting they can often be better than plastic (people typically don't clean plastic well enough, or replace often enough), but you can't sanitize them like you typically would in a commercial prep area, so they are disallowed/discouraged (based on jurisdiction).

PhD, and especially its near ubiquity in academic circles, is a relatively new phenomena.

Clunky, but should be ok assuming a) a pretty simple structure and cashflow b) properly implemented double-entry, and c) backups.

>> ("Covid rich") isn't meant just for the checks, and

>> ..., there was probably a bunch of discretionary spending on e.g. ...

i.e. money in your bank account that in a "normal" year you would have spent already. On top of the checks.

> feel they were "COVID rich" is something I just can't wrap my head around.

I think that term ("Covid rich") isn't meant just for the checks, but for the general increase of disposable income.

If you are low income, $2-3k in checks can effectively be a pretty big windfall as people note in this thread.

If you were middle income, there was probably a bunch of discretionary spending on e.g. meals out, shows, vacations that you didn't spend compared to previous years. It's not hard to see that being an "extra" 5 figures for lots of families.

Condolences on your loss, Aaron & family. Few of us will ever write software with as much impact as QModem, I hope that your father found satisfaction in that reach.