• Other people in other lands that are more passionate and hungrier than you are going to eat your lunch. If you're not passionate, you're going to be out of a job or paid to be a fungible code monkey.
• If you're not passionate already at this point, you probably won't be, or it'll be an uphill battle.
• It's not glamorous. Unless you work with Windows exclusively, it's slogging through a lot of text. No flashing lights, no hauwght hacker chix in spandex.
• Long hours, especially when something goes wrong, your business head overpromises, or you get bullied by your project manager to cut your estimate.
• Maths. Gotta have the maths, especially if you're going to do algorithms.
• If you're going to strike out on your own, you're going to have to have an entrepreneur streak and/or business acumen. If you don't strike out on your own, your path to riches are going to be confined to being at the right place at the right time at the right startup with the right people that aren't going to screw you out of your fortune.
• Along with the business acumen, network always so that the pump is primed for when the well goes dry (or whatever your favorite metaphor is).
• If you work for a big company or the government, be ready to work on antiquated hardware and old versions of software because they don't want to upgrade. It's cheaper in their eyes to have you work longer, since you're exempt, than to pay for a new machine or new software.
• Beware working for a small company that will never go public or doesn't give you equity. They'll overwork you, underpay you, and dangle big promotions for when they get bigger. Which they won't; or they'll give the good stuff to the outsider buddy of the C*O they just hired.

No, I'm not bitter.

DT

They make the voices inside my head be quiet.

DT

I still have mine sitting in an extra bedroom. Turn it on once every 5 years or so just to make sure that it's still running.

Ran WordStar and SuperCalc, and managed to get DBase II for it. Program disk in the left, data disk in the right. When it hit 10 years old it started munching diskette directories on writes infrequently, rendering them unusable. Have the 300 baud modem, too, which I used to connect to the university mainframe during undergrad. Uploading programs sometimes took a half-hour or more (and couldn't do anything else on it in the meantime). Was envious of my Kaypro-lugging buddies with their bigger screens until I got the 80-column mod which would output to a separate monochrome monitor.

Was totally adequate at the time, but started pining for that newfangled Apple Macintosh thingy when that came out.

Why I keep it, I have no idea.

DT

My list exactly. And right before I was going to purchase a 50+" LCD set from Samsung, too. Had it all picked out and everything.

Hard to avoid Belkin these days, tho. And Sony's movies.

DT

I think a house fire trumps physical CDs.

DT

Not horribly obvious is how to update for Linux users. You have to go to the blog to see that instead of downloading the .dropbox-dist update, you just need to:

1. Open a terminal.
2. $ dropbox stop
3. $ dropbox status # Should report "not running"
4. $ rm -r ~/.dropbox-dist/
5. $ dropbox start -i

Easy as pie. Don't have to be root either. Assumes you've already installed a previous version (with nautilus integration for Gnome, etc., etc.).

DT

Yah, but this is from the company that installed the rootkit on your computer.

BTW, what's the statute of limitations on bonehead behavior? So far I'm boycotting these companies:

• Sony: for the rootkit it installed when you put their CDs in your computer [2005]
• Belkin: for their router redirecting you to ads for their parental control system [2003]
• Burger King: for their obnoxious ads [ongoing since the 70s]

DT

Uninstalled and off my radar by then. Fool me, once, etc.

People probably still buy Belkin products after their routers redirected http requests to their advertisements and they paid for faked reviews, too.

DT

I stopped using NoScript after they did shenanigans with Adblock Plus subscription settings. If they're going to do that sort of behind-the-scenes tomfoolery, what else are they up to?

DT

Not such a bad idea when you think about it. The earth could use a break from all this "stewardship."

DT

Excepting that this is Microsoft, there's really nothing new to see here. A contract is a contract, no matter whether if it's with a 500 pound gorilla or with Guido from downtown (though the similarity is striking).

I had a relative that owned a wholesale food delivery service. Business was good, though the profit margin was small. During a small downturn in the economy back in the early 70s he had a couple restaurants declare bankruptcy on him. Unfortunately they were a couple of his biggest customers, and left him with pretty big bills. Well, guess what? He still had to pay his supplier, and that small fact finally drove him under (which would have happened anyway with the advent of Sysco, but that's a story for another day).

I guess the reasons we're complaining are that:

• It's Microsoft
• It's software

Granted, I like to get in on a little Microsoft-bashing myself, but I think that here they have them by rights. A little compassion would be nice, but perhaps they can appeal to the Gates Foundation for some of that.

Dt

(okay, here it comes...)

You must be new here.

DT