So, nothing then? Of all the plans to 'change the world', that's the worst I've heard.
Kindly stay out of the way whilst the rest of us continue trying to improve things.
1,513 karma · joined March 7, 2008
Kindly stay out of the way whilst the rest of us continue trying to improve things.
Now, what are you going to do about it out here in the Real World?
Many, many generations have come before you with exactly the same idea, and all struck out (most notably the "boomers", who went a long way towards giving us the environment we're facing now). It sounds as though you want someone else to fix the problems you're facing rather than pick up your tools and fix them yourself.
Learn about the environment you've found yourself in and then try to fix it to the extent you are able. If _everyone_ did that in their own corner of the world, we'd get the result we wanted.
I faced a load of crappy jobs when I graduated in the early 90s and found myself far, far behind where I thought I'd be. Today, I'm running the kind of company I wanted to work for when I graduated.
I've worked at fixing my corner of the world and have succeeded to some small extent -- what have you done?
You can believe whatever you want, but belief alone won't make it true. Accept the environment you've found yourself in and then do what you can to adapt to and correct it. That's what I've done.
Bitching about it without action is going to do squat.
The advice I read here was of the tone: "Hey, we were once where you are now. Take it from us: It gets better, but your current mindset is set for failure."
The author should spend a day picking through the youth-directed angsty tunes and movies of the early 90s. He's not the first to go through crap like this, even in recent history.
Suck it up and take on a McJob to pay the bills until things recover. The experience in social survival will do you a load of good the next time things get rough.
If one throws an hojillion low-quality posts up in a day, a few of those will be ranked +1. That grants frequent posters a ludicrously high karma score for what amounts to little overall contribution to the 'community'.
In a way, it's almost an MMORPG -- the longer you stick around and 'grind', the higher your score gets.
You know you should sit back and reason out what the problem might be (it worked before -- what's gone wrong?) but the rookie reflex is to start coding right away and to slap something -- ANYTHING! -- in that might make things right. That should make the yelling stop!
When that doesn't work, another patch is put in. Then another, and another, corrupting data and making things even worse!
...and so the cascade of 'Hail Mary' programming fixes is put in place until someone finally pulls the plug and yanks the poor, choking programmer aside for a breather.
It's rare for programmers to have a 'do or die' moment and few are prepared for or recognize it when it comes. If you ever feel the urge to rush: Don't.
I find it disturbing how few catch that reference, but self-direction isn't for everyone.
If the problem is pursued as described to keep the plane stationary on the treadmill (with the treadmill blazing so fast that the bearings in the plane's wheels eventually melt from friction), the plane will never take off.
However, since a treadmill cannot be constructed as described in the question, testing it is an impossibility. A plane on a normal treadmill will quickly move forward on the thing and take off -- but that's not the question being asked!
Argh!
Addressing your post: Software isn't a car and the marginal cost to manufacture more software licenses is zero. When I direct an hour of effort to our commercial software, I'm gaining many dollars of future passive revenue thanks to that created wealth.
Contrast that with services and a 'free' product, where each hour of effort gets a support dollar but generates no wealth at all! Pitted against that means of generating revenue, a service company giving away its product is going to lose in the long-run every time.
To see this, just look at the software marketplace: Aside from the solitary black-swan exception of RedHat (which arguably sells licenses instead of services anyhow), where are the profitable open source support contract companies?
I can spool up 3,000 software licenses sold today without batting an eye (and add in support charges on top of that if needed) making a ton of cash with which to hire employees for product improvement, but 3,000 hours of support is a huge cost requiring a great many employees to manage before even a penny of profit is obtained.
Bringing this back to my original point: Commercial software companies can easily dominate 'free' open source alternatives given that reality, so they can safely ignore their free 'competition'.
"...The Web consulting business was great, but it had one problem: limited margins. You could charge only so much for an hour of some consultant's time -- in those days, maybe $200. Some of that went to overhead (say $20) and some to pay the consultant's salary (maybe $70). That leaves you with a mere $110 per hour in gross profit. That's a lot of money, but it paled in comparison with margins in the software industry, in which you can produce additional copies of an application at virtually no cost."
So, if a body-shopping service company is competing against another body-shopping service company, they're facing the same per-employee costs and will have no problems in their market. However, if a body-shopping service company is competing against commercial software for the exact same product and market, commercial software will face lower costs and receive higher revenue for the same work and so will have more resources to bury that competing body-shop every time.
Also, if our company receives a service call, we regard it as a failure of our product to address our customer's needs. If a 'commercial' open source company receives that same call, they regard it as money earned from a support ticket.
Given that difference, which software product would you prefer to run in your business?
That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn, so it's easy to out-compete those folks as a business and provide a superior product.
If you try entering any garbage text in the 'search' you'll see auto-generated results (soon to be search-engine indexed) which claim to have that item available for download. All you need to do is sign up for an account to see 'em! Yeah... It's an old scam and probably ropes in more worried developers than it does pirates.
Keep an eye open for pirated copies and adapt as you can, but don't freak about every piracy notice you receive on Google Alerts.
There were no breakthroughs in basic science, fundamental ideas or raw technology which resulted from Apollo which would not have otherwise been achieved by a bit (not billions of dollars) of direct research in the fields of interest. You've not been able to identify a dozen (or even one!) of those advances you're so sure about.
Romantic and astounding as it was, Apollo was a money-sink which delivered us nothing but memories. It was an awesome 'night on the town' and we would have done better by constructing permanent space infrastructure instead.
The hope for spin-offs is a really horrible justification for a program. If you want to do something specific (say, establish a permanent human presence in space) why not do it direct instead of hope it results from a spin-off of something else?
Want something valuable? Mine an asteroid for platinum, build fuel cells out of it, and undercut the terrestrial competition while cleaning up on the profit. Right there you've identified a competitive advantage (low-cost of scarce resources) to satisfy a growing market which exists today.
We've tried the 'get something great as a result of spin-offs' route before. It disappoints every time. Why are people advocating it again with a human 'flags and footprints' Mars mission? Why don't we instead direct resources towards an inspiring goal which delivers something concrete?
Given the choice, I would much rather today have a permanent LEO infrastructure of a dozen privately funded Skylabs (from those same tried-and-true Saturn V rocket parts) and cis-lunar tugs rather than the 'spin off' soon-to-be-retired Goldberg contraption of Shuttle.
Given a fixed amount of time and research money, what provides the best return for the next four decades?
I'd say the statement "Jobs are not created, only reallocated." did that. Whatever your beliefs and intended context, your statement is completely incorrect.
You are describing things backwards: Jobs do not create wealth -- individuals seeking wealth create jobs.
Individual 'A' hires individuals 'B through n' to realize their vision to build wealth. Jobs do not spawn themselves spontaneously and seek out individual 'A' to bestow upon them the wealth generated by the working individuals 'B through n'.
Jobs are created by wealth. They are not a constant bestowed through the universe by fate.
We don't live in a world of scarcity. Scarcity is created by artificial constraints imposed by those who believe wealth (and society's employment) is a fixed quantity to be allocated by a central force of some sort.
"I'd have plenty if only those who have much more than me would give up their fair share." That's idiocy.
There were ~1.7 Billion people on the planet in 1900. Are there only ~1.7 Billion jobs to go around for the ~6-7 Billion people on the planet today?
Wealth is created from industry, which creates jobs to build that wealth. We do not live in a world of scarcity -- scarcity is imposed by nonsense such as a command economy's forced reallocation of resources.
That reminds me of another fabled kid who pointed out that the emperor was walking around stark naked.
Now that we're in a bust, what does that tell you about their future prospects?
Google has one strong source of revenue (search advertising) and has been thrashing about for years in an attempt to build at least a second source without notable success.
Microsoft has many different sources of revenue and continues to build on each. To take out Google, all they have to do is have Bing, Yahoo and the rest patiently chip away at GOOG's search advertising dominance by a few percentage points each year and that revenue will dry up. Then, without that revenue, all of Google's vanity projects will collapse in a heap.
Google's many projects remind me of the Flying Lawnmower: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWfqVWC2KI
You can make anything fly if you have a strong enough engine shoving it and Google's engine is its search advertising revenue. Once that revenue decreases enough, their lawnmower will fall to earth, and Microsoft is surely happy to see them tack on new expensive doodads like YouTube and Chrome O/S to hurry that day forward.
I can almost picture Steve Ballmer slapping his cheeks with a mocking "Oh, no! Google's dominating yet another money-sucking cost pit! Whatever shall we do?!?!" before bursting out in laughter.
Sure, Mark Cuban lived on bar food and crashed on a single couch in an apartment shared with a number of other guys, but that was before he'd even started as an employee selling software at a small tech shop! As soon as his means let him live better, he did.
The example provided for Penelope Trunk is even worse: The temporary blindness, stress-induced pain, and apparent psychosis seems to have cropped up just as her latest company started accelerating down the road to ruin ( as told at, http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/05/7-things-to-conside... )
I don't know how long the author's been in business but, if you follow your own advice, your body is likely to give out before your company has an exit.
Your company exists for your benefit, not the other way around.
>However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial
>biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!
Where do you get that from?
We just don't know how to live on other worlds. We are almost completely ignorant of the complexities involved in the process and have a whole bunch of unpleasant discoveries to make yet. That's not to say it _can't_ be done and that we don't know what should happen in theory, but we have never done it before. Ever. There is no experience to build upon.
If you want another flags and footprints mission to plant a candelabra of pennants on Mars and then scurry back after a few days of visiting, by all means piss away hundreds of billions of dollars and go to Mars direct for a quick visit. However, if you want to learn the actual skills required to live and work on other worlds, you should focus on building missions which demonstrate and refine the skills required to live and work on other worlds.
Doing so on our Moon and near-Earth asteroids (the nearest locations to support and safety) is the best way to do that and will give us the tools needed to move outwards permanently.