patrick.net

richwicks says

Here's a FREE idea - creating family groups to do cooking. Get a bunch of families together to cook not just for themselves, but several people. I don't know if that can be monetized, I don't know if it would be socially acceptable, but it's kind of like carpooling for dinner.

I've seen a version of this before. There were a few companies that offered kitchen space and all the ingredients to make as much food as you wanted. It was some kind of assembly line and you could make a weeks worth of food in an hour or so.

richwicks says

It's one of those things that if I told you what it was, you'd be like "shit! Why didn't I think of that??" It's that easy.

Come on man, easy? Get your ass on it. What are you waiting for? $$?

NuttBoxer says

GNL says

I would LOVE to know more about what this SAAS does for it's industry.

Everything from sales, to inventory, to accounting.

For their own in-house use or for the industry?

GNL says

richwicks says

It's one of those things that if I told you what it was, you'd be like "shit! Why didn't I think of that??" It's that easy.

Come on man, easy? Get your ass on it. What are you waiting for? $$?

Again, I need permanent storage capacity. Also, I don't know if I can protect it via patent or copyright. You need that.

I can lie about a solution, CLAIM that what I produce is permanent, and by the time people find out it isn't, be dead, but I don't want to be a piece of shit. I don't want to be a Sam Bankman Fried or Bernie Madoff. If I ever make this, I want to actually make it.

If you can find a storage solution that will last for at LEAST 1000 years, I'll make you rich. I can't market worth shit, but I know this would sell well. It's not a DVD or CDR. Flash possibly, but it's basically a dead storage solution, and limited in storage capacity, too limited. Need at least 1 GB of storage. NAND flash won't work, of course an HDD won't work (lifespan is around 10 years). I just need something that is permanent. Doesn't have to be read write, write once read many - WORM. Has to last for LONG TIME. You actually don't need to delete files when you get to a certain point, a 350 TB disk, you'll never have to delete a file as long as you're doing differences of files, copying files all the time could fill it up..

5D optical storage is a possible solution. That has like 350 TB of storage, and it's expected to last for 1000's of years. IF that ever comes out, I have a really good product for it. IF it comes out. Any idea how much 350 TB is? Every film, and television show, I've seen in my lifetime will fit on it. Even if it degrades over time, I can implement error correction for it, if 1 out of 10 bits fails on it, I can reconstruct the data. 1GB/hr is high enough quality to show on a film screen. It's so fucked up where we are. Every single book you've ever read, every word you've heard, or spoken (reduced to text) will fit on an $11 SD card, but that only lasts for 10 years. I have a library of books that's so vast, I can't read it all before I'm dead. Just have to remember to copy it at some point before the storage mechanism fails. The Library of Alexandria has nothing on me.

I'm in awe of where we are, and nobody realizes what kind of just incredible power they all have. I can literally do nuclear bomb simulation on toys now. It's fucking nuts. Just a few decades ago, it was ILLEGAL to export Playstation 2 boxes to certain nations, because they could be put together in a Beowulf system to be a super computer, to do nuclear simulations. That shit runs on my phone now. The highest of high tech in, say, 1985, you have in your pocket. Cray? That's a pathetic $50 phone you buy at 7/11 on a pre-paid phone plan. People have no idea the ridiculous amount of power everybody has, and they have no clue how to access it.

These are strange times.

just_passing_through says

Kub and spark!

Yeah I don't know why I can't get excited about those new fangled products.
I think because it's all so convoluted, at least in the MS Dev RAD, you develop, compile and deploy, without having to sign a bunch of other EUA.

GNL says

For their own in-house use or for the industry?

Industry. SAAS stands for "software as a service".

NuttBoxer says

GNL says

For their own in-house use or for the industry?

Industry. SAAS stands for "software as a service".

Yes, that was a silly question. My company is also an SAAS. The SAAS space(?) is where I think developers can shine if they look for an industry that could use one. In my case, I believe I am decentralizing my industry by making it so independent 1-person businesses can compete on a much more even playing field. We NEED decentralization.

GNL says

Yes, that was a silly question. My company is also an SAAS. The SAAS space(?) is where I think developers can shine if they look for an industry that could use one. In my case, I believe I am decentralizing my industry by making it so independent 1-person businesses can compete on a much more even playing field. We NEED decentralization.

The sad part is by time you pay to have all of that developed, then the technology and the servers they run on, will be out of date and on the verge of being retired. Or the company that host your apps, will move on past the versions your software requires.

The reality is most businesses could and probably should still be running on NT 4.0 on IIS 4, built on ASP classic, but definitely not Cold Fusion.

Most companies I know are always many, many major versions behind when it comes to their SW and infrastructure. I would expect SAAS companies to actually be ahead of the game in most cases.

Tenpoundbass says

The sad part is by time you pay to have all of that developed, then the technology and the servers they run on, will be out of date and on the verge of being retired. Or the company that host your apps, will move on past the versions your software requires.

The reality is most businesses could and probably should still be running on NT 4.0 on IIS 4, built on ASP classic, but definitely not Cold Fusion

Find a company, scare the shit out of them and then hold out your hand with a solution. Make big $$.

The reality is as long as people are being bullshited and baffled by Hype Tech abound. Then I don't want to write software in that reality, as people really don't know what they want, as they don't understand what is doable and what is just hyped up bullshit and smoke and mirrors.

I see where people need an information suite of tools and easy to access contextual menus at easy reach. But in every organization there is no shortage of assholes that then question why my app doesn't look like all of the other information limited clunky applications. It must look and behave like all of the other websites, regardless how ineffective those sites are at serving their needs. If the crap worked like it was supposed to, then the Obamacare rollout would have been a smashing success, and the Salesforce implementation of the programs I wrote would have taken only taken three months rather than going on the third year.

I can't just make them a windows from app it has to be XAML but then they wonder why the requirements they require that don't fit in any contextual hit point isn't working.

We need to get back to the point where the business owners ask capable developers to write software, the developer gathers requirements from the actual users in the business that understands and owns those process. New hires are expected to be smart enough to understand the Windows menu layout standards, and all menu and contextual menus are where they are supposed to be. Without dumbing down the applications to the point the software is more of a baby sitter for idiots than an Enterprise management solution.

No I'm not writing this software for AWS, and no I'm not writing automated tests for it either. As those tests merely confirm that all of the crud calls to the database is working and that the model is complete. By time I pushed the program to production, I know for a fact my model is solid. The only errors I was called about were end user errors. Calls saying they can't find a product, that wasn't even in the system yet, or they were searching the wrong item or customer number. Or they tried to insert values that were of the wrong type. And they are too lazy to read the message, that they are trying to put the first name in a zipcode text box.

It just wore me down!

richwicks says

Here's a FREE idea - creating family groups to do cooking. Get a bunch of families together to cook not just for themselves, but several people. I don't know if that can be monetized, I don't know if it would be socially acceptable, but it's kind of like carpooling for dinner.

I've seen a version of this before. There were a few companies that offered kitchen space and all the ingredients to make as much food as you wanted. It was some kind of assembly line and you could make a weeks worth of food in an hour or so.

Both ideas had potentials, and businesses experimented with them in the late 90's and early 00's. Then inductive cooktop (with both temperature and time control) came along, making cooking a meal on the stove top as trivial as operating a microwave. Now with inductive cooktop, dishwasher and washer+dryer, 67% of a wife (cooking and cleaning) is obsolete.

In the 80's I dated a Cuban girl, her mom had Cuban food delivered for dinner every night by a Homecook that had several customers.
She was a Realtor, and the Dad was a Mazda mechanic at a dealership. But demanded dinner when he got home, so they paid for those aluminum containers with the paper lids of food delivered every day.

richwicks says

Blu-ray was "cracked" initially by some person that setup a script to advance the video one frame at a time, and screen shot the image each frame. They then pulled the audio (I don't know how, could have been done through analog) and then used a program to encode all the images into film again.

The typical way of cracking this type of protection is to go after software solutions since they are easier to debug and understand. Reverse engineer how something like PowerDVD communicates with the drive, what keys it uses, etc, then do the same and save the decrypted stream off. Zero loss in quality. Sure, they'll blacklist the keys, but new ones have to be put into updated versions of that same software package, so it's just a matter of going after them again.

As long as you have access to the method and the keys, they can only delay you through obfuscation.

Source: Used to be a bit of a reverse engineer myself. Found it was the best way to learn how things really worked, especially when documentation was garbage or non-existent.

Tenpoundbass says

Development and the Software Design Life Cycle has been so dumbed down over the last 10 to 15 years. New raw fresh talent has been replaced with frameworks and CRM end users.

This describes my 30 years of experience. I loved writing clever programs as a teenager. The code I wrote in the 1990s for startups was mostly my code with relatively minor amounts of library and framework use. Years later it was mostly crappy javascript (ugggh) calls into frameworks for stuff that was running on the cloud. There was absolutely no joy in that type of "software development."

GNL says

I'm also interested in understanding why more developers don't start their own companies.

If a developer starts their own company, then they are busy being a CEO and not a software developer. So, I'll answer a slightly different question: Why don't more developers join small startups or create a startup with a good idea and hand the management off to someone else as they continue to work on the software.

The problem I see with startups is that it's boom or bust. Through survivorship bias, we tend to only see the rags-to-riches situations. But the reality is that you might work long hours for several years and get paid poorly; then the company goes bust and you have worthless stock options and the "technology" you developed is sent to the dustbin.

Joining an established company gives you a pretty solid floor (higher and more reliably salary than a startup), a high expected financial return, and a possibility of huge riches. Maybe not $100 MM of stock options like in a startup, but several million in accumulated stock and benefits over a decade. It's a tradeoff: Do you want a high chance of enough to retire comfortably (established company) or a very small chance of hitting the jackpot (startup)?

My own situation is exactly as I describe above: 7 startups in 10 years. The two mid-1990s IPOs I went through both fizzled when the market turned and the stock options were worth maybe $50k total at their height (after working for 5 years making $30k/year less than market value). Other startups devolved into doing contract work for other companies to keep the money coming in; or they just went out of business. But in 2002 I joined Apple. It was a fantastic time to join the company, as the second wave of Steve Jobs was gathering momentum. Those original stock options and stock grants had startup-like gains, but even skilled developers who joined only 10 years ago have been making steady $400k/year when you combine salary and stock grants. Why trade that in on a lottery ticket?

SunnyvaleCA says

But in 2002 I joined Apple. It was a fantastic time to join the company, as the second wave of Steve Jobs was gathering momentum. Those original stock options and stock grants had startup-like gains, but even skilled developers who joined only 10 years ago have been making steady $400k/year when you combine salary and stock grants. Why trade that in on a lottery ticket?

Because I would bet that there are only so many developers of your caliber and will never see those high salaries and stock options. You don't have to start a cutting edge type of business. There are companies making millions of dollars per year creating well below cutting edge systems.

Tell me, how cutting edge, really, is Twitter, Facebook and Instagram?

how do you find clients? theres your answer.

SunnyvaleCA says

Why don't more developers join small startups or create a startup with a good idea and hand the management off to someone else as they continue to work on the software.

I worked with an architect who did just that. The guy told me once the company starts getting bigger and introducing process, he tends to bail.

GNL says

Tell me, how cutting edge, really, is Twitter, Facebook and Instagram?

I can answer this.

A single person can develop the main interface to the site, and if you decentralize it, maybe two people are needed.

Monetization might be a problem, HOWEVER, I don't think most publishers are looking to monetize, they just want fame of some sort. Once they have a certain level of fame, THEN they want monetization.

The worth of these companies are directly tied to two things 1) how many eyes are on the site 2) how much the government dumps into them to create "the narrative".

I HIGHLY DOUBT there is as many users of Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube as is claimed. Once you create an account, you're there FOREVER as a "user", even if you create 20 accounts, and never log into them ever again. I use an account on Youtube that is tied to an email address I was locked out of 15 years ago. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors.

They are concerned with creating a false consensus, not a real one. This is why they don't care about driving users off, or censoring people who just go elsewhere. When has a video on Bitchute or Rumble been referenced in our "news" media?

I am curious as to a true consensus. People can be wrong of course, they can be "toxic" (and I mean LEGITIMATELY toxic), you can't escape propaganda bots, intelligence agencies infiltrate every group, so - how do you filter all those frauds out? I know it can be done, but it has to be so fucking simple, that people will make use of it. What if we could all see who had been ignored on this site and by whom, and WHY they were ignored. I don't think it's a legitimate reason to ignore a person because they are wrong (or you THINK they are wrong..), but it does make sense to ignore them if they are actively dishonest.

@"mostly reader" (https://patrick.net/user/mostly%20reader) I consider actively dishonest. He denied that the US overthrew Ukraine despite me explaining it, showing source material, and going through a lot of effort of explaining why I thought this. His response was simply to engage in ad-hominem, when I pressed him for how he developed his viewpoint, he would only show me sites that spoke exclusively Ukrainian and Russian (in video - so very difficult to translate that), and was demanding I learn another language to understand what he CLAIMED was his viewpoint. I think he's a spook, but no way to know. He never gave me any way to reevaluate my thinking, he just tried to intimidate me into accepting his claims. Maybe I'm wrong, but he didn't engage in any effort to try to convince me I was in error.

I don't ignore anybody, I prefer to do that manually. I have placed a few people on ignore temporarily, simply because they kept posting on subjects that is outside of my experience, and which I can't form any rational opinion on. I don't know or understand the conflict between Sikh's and Hindus for example and even if I did, I don't see my nation taking sides in this battle, so I'm entirely not involved with it, have no stake in it, and I cannot take sides because I'm far too ignorant about the situation.