Sigh...had to take Linux off the laptop. Seing as how I won't spring for the $150 mimi-PCI card from IBM to enable the standard ethernet port, and I couldn't figure out how to get the PCMCIA sockets to start before authentication (trust me, I read and re-read the scripts a hundred times in the last three weeks). Maybe I'd have more luck with SuSE, but I've only got the live CD.

Sigh, so Windows is going back on, since its about the only way to get all the little bells and whistles to work. Ah well, at least I got the servers (it's amazing what you can find in dumpsters behind old tech companies).

This came up in the poll about files, and I think its interesting (more so than some of the more hilarious comments, gotta stop reading /. so early).

In my freshman year of college, because of class scheduling, I got to start my CS classes a semester before a lot of people, and as such was saved from suffering from the lectures of the Physics Dean (the bolding is intentional, and honestly, if the guy could, I think he would speak in all bold, but his being a pompous ass aside). So I had a lot of free time to dink about on well setup and maintained Unix and Unix-like machines (Solaris and Debian GNU/Linux). So, one day, after reading a PDF prepared by the TA that had all kinds of fancy symbols, I asked how he made such a spiffy thing (I naively thought only Acrobat full-something-pay-$500 could do that). He said we wrote it in plain ASCII using good ol' Emacs (still my favorite editor, you vi elitists can save it (never should have been part of the POISX standard if you ask me)) and used LaTeX to lay it out, and then a helper progam to convert (a filter in true Unix parlance for those of you who have forgotten or do not know) it to a bunch of formats, including the PDF. He then showed me which modules to load up and where I could find documentation.

And so I went off and merrily dinked around and read a lot of documentation. Generally good times. Maybe I'm weird, but I can read good documentaion for hours (maybe the historian in me). Anyway, I figured out a lot of the more scientific aspects of LaTeX and did a lot of experimentaion with generating said documents. By the end of the semester, I could whip off fancy documents fairly easily.

So, up comes the first Physics paper. And I needed to place a few summations in the middle of a paragraph. For some reason (probably my then girlfriend), I started using Word. And then I came to the summations, and I was stuck. Word had some reasonably okay things to do formulas, but the boneheads at M$ (I know, I shouldn't have expected much) didn't put a Sigma in there. So after finishing the paper, I sat and looked at it and said, "I could do better." I copied the text out of Word and into Emacs to ensure I had good ASCII text. I then went to town with my knowledge of LaTeX and formatted up the paper in a nice clean way, including nice scientific symbols. I then uploaded the file to the Unix boxen (I hadn't gotten TeX of any variety on my machine at that point) and ran all the filters over the file and downloaded the resulting PDF. I open said PDF, and here is this beautifully formatted document (okay, nicely formatted) just like I would see in my textbooks.

So I print off my paper and hand it in to the Physics TA. When I got the paper back, the TA asked how I got the document to format with all the scientific symbols. Did I have the fancy extension to M$ Word that apparently exists for scientific work? Nope. Did I figure out some trick in regular M$ Word? Nope. What did I do? I typed it up, and marked it up for LaTeX and did the necessary filtration to make the document. The TA was baffled (she had never used a Unix or Unix-like device before, apparently the scientists studing magentism use Windows, even for hardware control!), and I explained what the CS TA had told me. Apparently after that, she consulted with other TA's and the prof (who, most notably, already used LaTeX to format his lecture notes suitable for online posting after lecute) and was subsequently introduced.

The point of this long and weakly annecdotal story? We need to dump WYSIWYG editors (this includes my beloved OO.org) and switch back into that old wirte/typesetter modality. Soemthing with the author concentrating on content with vauge ideas for physical layout and the typesetter unconcerned of content and concerned only with good looking and appropraite layout. Generally, this will still be one person, but that one person should concentrate on writing first, and presenting second.

Now I need to go an refresh my LaTeX knowledge, I haven't written anything besides ASCII text (oh yeah, side-note to up-comming college kiddies who have not yet had a literature class: they hate it when you send them unformatted, plain-text documents) for a long time.

You know, I sometimes wonder what life would be like without marketing. Or more specifically, if we didn't need to sell the technology to Joe Sixpack.

We wouldn't have a bloated and wasteful processor named the Pentium 4 (yes, Virginia, its wasteful, it does all this ridiculous forward computation, with hundreds of steps, and chucks most of it out the window, but because it does this, it can have clock speeds of GHz+). We would have good processors that may be slower in clock-speed but do fewer wasted computations (well, AMD is kinda like this).

We wouldn't have cell-phones with cameras in them. Frankly, when the cell-phone people still can't give me wire-line signal quality, why should I care about crappy, low-res digital photos. Isn't the ether cluttered with enough of these things already? And on top of this, especially with LG's supposed 7 MP camera, how about a phone with reasonably written firmware? My own LG phone will fail to give me audio if it doesn't recieve the signal from the carrier within x-many milliseconds (I'll call someone, I'll hear nothing, then hang up only to get a call from that someone asking if I called).

Who gives a rip about what Joe Sixpack wants? The fact fo the matter is if you have enough of a marketing juggernaut (M$ comes to mind) you can convince Joe Sixpack to buy whatever you want him to buy. Joe and Jane Sixpack are very gullible idiots.

Honestly, its this kind of pandering/marketing that has taken what was a branch of mathematics (every CS prof I've had with, one exception, has had at least a BS/BA in mathematics) and dragged it through the mud. CS used to be about doing something interesting with those chips the physicists, chemists and electrical engineers came up with. Now its about 'enterprise' and use-cases and formalized diagrams through UML. If this crap had existed 30 years ago, UNIX would never have been, we'd still be waiting on Multics. All to please management, which wants to please the investors, which is essentialy a group of John Champagnes. And guess what? John Champagne may have money, but he's every bit as much of an idiot as his cousin Sixpack.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here, there are some intelligent, non-computer people out there, but they seem to be few and far between.

This is something I see a lot, and I feel I need to correct it once again.

The US is not at its generating capacity. In fact, if one looks at it, we most likely over-generate. The problem is one of distribution.

Ever since the deregulation of power companies, distribution has become a problem. There is no incentive for a state to build expensive power-lines to another state, as it will cost them a lot of money and they wouldn't immediately see a benfit.

When the federal government controlled the setup of the grid, it was always trying to ensure that the system was stable as possible. Deregulation would have been a good idea, had the population distribution stayed the same. However, things shifted and power consumption went up (thanks to the computer revolution) while the power system stayed the same.

As such, states weren't getting the system upgrades they had gotten under the federally controlled plan. So when some states come to a point of energy shortage, they build new generators, often way over the capacity required. And as for the others, they often don't have the option of more plants for various reasons, and they just hope the grid can withstand the strain of a harder pull. And when they pull too hard (blackouts last year in the Eastern US) the system fails and fails hard.

Also, it doesn't help that the current nation-wide grid is split more or less down the middle of the country.

Anyways, rememeber, it's distribution that's the problem (which stems from deregulation).

Twas a book on this, but the title escapes me at this hour. I'll update this when I figure it out.

Well, since I missed the post about the Lone Coder, it'll be more or less worthless (just as writing here is more or less worthless, except I can find it easily here) to post a comment.

So here are my $0.02:
The "Lone Coder" never truly existed, or if he/she did, they quickly adopted the practice of working with other "Lone Coders: after a short period of time.
For a long while (read: the Gulag institution known as ... well, I'll not utter it here as it is an evil name), I was a "Lone Coder". I wrote lots of stuff, some which was nifty, some which was only for my own enjoyment. Hey, who knew it would take that long to write a Pong(TM) clone in TI-83 BASIC (I hadn't yet learned of TI-Calc.org).
Then I began to work with folks who were better with numbers an procedures than I were, so they fed me scientific algorithms and I produced the C code for the TI-89 and the BASIC code for the TI-83. And then, for them to really do spiffy homeworks (if we had only known how to muck about in either M$ Office or OO.org or TeX), I began crafting programs for the PC.
Then in the fall of 2002 I want to the big ol' University of Minnesota (almost finished, in case anyone cares, 24 credits to go after this semester and no required's left). And I took the first semester freshman CS course (lucky enough via the lottery system, which in turn allowed me to have a decent Physics Prof). The entire point of the class, outside of exposing everyone to something other than the pithy Javascripts/VB-Scripts/Weakly-coded-C (don't knock Scheme until you can devise a simpler and more useful teaching language (Karel the Robot does not count)), was to get us to work together. It was here I hooked up with a lab partner that complemented my skills. There were areas he was great at and I was poor at, areas I was great at and he was poor in, and many many areas where we were both great. He's been my lab partner for 4.5 semesters now, and between us, there are few problems we can solve.
I also got a job in a research lab. In the lab, I am somewhat a "Lone Coder", although I do occassionaly talk with the fluid-physicists (the director and the chief scientist) to hash out ideas, or I talk to the other good coder who has been working on some high performance I/O stuff (I muck about with meta-data/data management).
I do still program on my own free time, but I have less and less time to do this (what can I say, I chase tail in my free time after homework). But my programs are mostly for my own self and not a commercial nature. The last thing I tried to develop with comercial intent was a kind of Physics framework and application built on that framework that would in effect allow people to have the computer do thier homework. I figured I could cop at most $5 from students for it (I did have a pretty nifty anti-pirating scheme, although some would consider it slightly extreme: if you were using a bootleg copy, it would systematically destroy its support binaries, no matter how often you reloaded), which would make me a very rich student, very quickly ($5 bucks a copy, need for approximately a thousand copies per year guaranteed, less expenses (initially on CD's then on a website), you can see how quickly this can also bloom when being sold at other schools). But I got bogged down and fucked around by a few girls, and I lost the urge to keep working on it. It's about halfway done, so I may just GPL the code and GDL the documentation and let it go.
Now my code from my "Lone Coder" efforts is for the good of all, or at least immediate good use by me. So as far as the world of commercial software is concerned, any "Lone Coder" is going to be very alone and left quickly behind by those working in large open-source groups or those working in corporations. Not just with patent issues, but just with the fact that, up to a certain point, more coders equals better code and faster rollout of working code.

But best of luck to you loners looking for commercial success. I would recommend you ask for help, and I offer my services if you want them (provided the task is interesting, so if you're looking for someone to help you make a GNU/Linux distro or GNU/Hurd distro or any OS, forget it, there are plently enough eyes on that problem), and I'm sure others would if you ask. If you pull it off, look me up if you need a coder/architect/etc.

Besides, its always fun to root for the underdog.