I wouldn't be surprised if Apple starts more collaborations with Microsoft. Remember how IBM was Apple's big enemy and then they got into bed with each other?
Article is predicated on the idea that evil and innovation are mutually exclusive. I think it's more true that evil and innovation are pretty tightly coupled.
I don't think evil is related to size or innovation; it's just selective reporting.
E.g. People only care about whether a company is evil if it creates products and services they want to use, or whether the company is so massive that it can't be avoided.
Small companies can't, and companies with crappy products don't, inflict their evil upon you -- so no-one notes whether they're evil or not, skewing results.
It could well be (and I believe it to be the case) that every company is essentially 'evil', but that tendency can only be exposed when they attain the requisite leverage to push what they want, as a priority, onto the market.
Perhaps it's not evil so much as it is difficulty in making decisions? Everybody has good intentions, and most people fuck them up at some point or other. The difference is that when large companies fuck up, it hurts more than when individuals do, and it's more noticeable.
I love embedded servers. I don't think adding SSL would be that hard. I've done something very similar in C# and kept putting off SSL, only to find that X.509 authentication was trivial.
The harder part is maintaining session info between requests and garbage collecting dead sessions, though you could just authenticate each request.
> I'm just hoping MacRuby will enable the Ruby world to build our own open source Textmate clone so we'll be able to ditch this abandonware piece of crap.
Thanks for reminding me why I don't want to do Ruby.
It sounds to me like this would be a good candidate for an iPhone and BlackBerry app. How many people shoot guns when they're sitting in front of the computer (other than us developers)? ;)
It's a bullet trajectory calculator. Only way I can see this thing making money is if it was made into a pocket-calculator type of thing and mass produced in Guangdong China.
It sounds to me like it's intended for developing custom loads for guns, not calculating ballistics in the field. The target market would be handloaders who sometimes spend thousands of dollars on reloading equipment. An ad-supported web app or a paid GUI app would be very viable.
I can't say more than that I would certainly not buy one, nor even use a free one. But then again, I can say the same thing about a bingo card generator too. Also, it looks like he's not trying to make a living on it, but simply break even or make a bit of extra cash.
I write code by analyzing requirements and then breaking them into a series of milestones and attaching requirements to each milestone. I show the client how I have interpreted their requirements and make sure we are in sync. I then delegate as much non-core work as possible to others. I tend to separate the functional and visual aspects of each milestone.
Regarding the ordering of milestones, where there is some discretion available I tend to do things that will keep the client happy. The objective is to deliver the project on time with the minimum level of stress for all involved.
I don't lie about in bed dreaming about imaginary packets.
