obstinate.org

In the past few days, rumors have been flying that Verizon has been in talks with Apple to distribute the iPhone on Verizon’s CDMA network. While this is something that I support, as I happen to despise AT&T’s service and coverage – I am skeptical of such reports. The Apple Marketing Machine is no less than genius, any tiny changes in the entire product line, or even rumors as such puts the media into a frenzy.

Lets take a look at the angle each of the 3 companies would have in the rumored deal between Apple and Verizon with a CDMA iPhone:

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People make excuses. It is natural, and something that I think is a part of the human condition. One cannot help that some part or another of anything is inadequate. It is just the tendency of people to be unable to accept it, and such come up with a string of items that somehow explain these inadequacies. The problem is that invariably it almost never makes up for it. In fact, some people crank out excuses with such vigor that they are hurled into everything that they do or interact with as if they have the self image that they can do no wrong.

She was so nice, the sex was great, always had a great time, it was fantastic… except she had a beard.
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austie: wii game sales are insane
austie: I wonder what nintendo’s work environment is like
austie: if they are slathering that money around
austie: if it feels good to be at nintendo right now
mikey: its in japan
mikey: they are all government employees i bet
austie: japan is all about corp success respect knuckles
austie: I bet nintendo runs the govt at this point
austie: nintendo and toyota
mikey: hah govt exercise programs on wii fit
austie: if you are president of either of those companies, I think you can just tell people to die and they then commit sepaku before your eyes.
mikey: could be useful when they need to start downsizing

You can see the creative juices really, really flowing here. 

austie jonez: I want a tube that I can fill with salad and use a pushup to get it into my mouth. forking salads all day long is lame
mikey: i have been eating salads lately
mikey: but using the pushup approach would be good
mikey: although i fear i would engineer some way to use it without having to do pushups

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Know what I hate? I hate it when a vendor advertises a price which appears like it might be quite low, but then charges you all sorts of surpluses and fee’s. A great example is a restaurant that REQUIRES gratuity, what’s up with that? Why don’t they just charge more for the food so they can pay their server’s a reasonable wage? Why do they need to trick me with low prices just to charge me later anyways?

Another thing is offices that have no public parking, and im not talking about downtown high rises where space is a serious issue. Here in west LA there is a plethora of buildings that are not stressed for space but charge for parking anyways. Why? because they can. It dawned upon me the other day when I was cleaning out my car and I had like 15 parking receipts. People should just charge the price all-inclusive without tricking people.

I had heard awhile back that in the mid-west some local politician passed an ordinance requiring movie theaters to advertise the actual time that the movie was started, instead of the industry standard of advertising the time that the 30 minutes of commercials start. This is a step in the right direction, kudos.

Open source projects are neat, they allow ideas that otherwise would go unheard in businesses to gain traction and development time. Open source code development is a great thing, I do it. I have seen lots of great code come out of open source developers. As I see it, all open source projects are destined to one of these 4 basic categories:

1. A ‘real’ project / service that is monetized
2. A clusterfuck of a bazillion developers that lose track of the original insight
3. A clearly guided project of a few individuals who spend their spare time developing something out of the goodness of their heart.
4. Total Failure.

In my opinion Options 1, followed by 3 are the best outcomes. If the idea is any good, it will fall into category 1, 2 or 4, if not it will fall into category 3.

The reason open source fails is for one blatent reason: The Community. Recently I have seen several open source communities start to destroy the enviornment that they benefit from. Everyone wants something for free, and the Open Source communities are blatantly at the front of the bread line.

Over and over again I see the real developers driven away from their once beloved projects by people who take personal offense from skilled programmers from making money. Why would anyone want to stick around for that? The second that any developer starts to think about monetizing their creation – the ‘Community’ swoops in and scolds them for being selfish bastards.

With this kind of reaction all developers (me being one of them, sort of ) will always prefer to take their skills to the private industry. Sure, they might contribute here and there to something or another, but their skills can never be fully utilized as they are fully devoted (as they should) to the job that pays the bills, not the one that they take undue criticizing via chat / email / boards from on a daily basis.

If I had a manager that I worked for speak to me the way that I see people treat hard working developers, I’d punch him in the fucking mouth.