“The TAPR Open Hard­ware License (“OHL”) pro­vides a frame­work for hard­ware projects that is sim­i­lar to the one used for Open Source soft­ware. This isn’t as straight-​​forward as it seems because legal con­cepts that work well for soft­ware (such as copy­right and copy­left) don’t neatly fit when deal­ing with hard­ware prod­ucts and the doc­u­men­ta­tion used to cre­ate them.”

“So the plan, when we’re not within WiFi range, is pro­vide Inter­net access to Cowork­out par­tic­i­pants that don’t have their own cel­lu­lar data card with one of these — a Ver­i­zon V740 EvDO card:…”

[Installing on Leop­ard Server seems even sim­pler, when I think about it]

“…And now you can start your server as usual with script/​server. If you see any error, check the back­trace to see which plugin/​gem is caus­ing it and try to google about it, but hope­fully your appli­ca­tion will run smoothly from the first time.”

“That Wil­son regarded “rea­son and the senses” so highly that he thought the Bible could not “supercede” the find­ings of such demon­strates that his political-​​theology mer­its the label “rationalism.””

“Here’s the idea: A mobile, out­door co-​​working space. That’s pretty much it.”

[Com­pare with afore­men­tioned Bob Martin’s Crafts­man­ship post…]

“As of today, there’s no Craigslist busily destroy­ing the finan­cial foun­da­tions of the mod­ern uni­ver­sity. Teach­ing is a lot more com­pli­cated than adver­tis­ing, and uni­ver­si­ties have the advan­tage of sit­ting behind government-​​backed bar­ri­ers to com­pe­ti­tion, in the form of accred­i­ta­tion. Any­one can use the Inter­net to sell clas­si­fied ads or pub­lish opin­ion columns or ana­lyze the local news. Not any­one can sell credit-​​bearing courses or widely rec­og­nized degrees.”

“A cou­ple of good thoughts about those unin­tended con­se­quences we cre­ate out here on the social side of the inter­net. I think that many of us are putting our­selves online in a very open and hon­est way because we want to con­nect to peo­ple. I’m sur­prised how many peo­ple I’ve con­nected with online who describe them­selves as intro­verts. Hav­ing some tools that allow peo­ple to con­nect, includ­ing those who find it dif­fi­cult to con­nect in their ana­log lives, is a tremen­dous social good.”

[not­ing this in par­tic­u­lar for the pub­lish­ing busi­ness model it shadows]

“If mem­ory serves, when there were about 300 Dal­ton stores, the sale of 6 copies a week con­sti­tuted a “hot list” book and 6 copies a month was “warm list.” This was my first les­son in how few books sell enough to cre­ate sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance in any one store. That’s a crit­i­cal thing to understand.

Soon, Dal­ton had estab­lished the con­cept of “model stock”, books that were auto­mat­i­cally reordered based on sales. Smart sales reps learned quickly that get­ting a model was more impor­tant than get­ting a big quan­tity buy to the sales health of most books.”

“I also am still unable to shake the sense that I am some­how respon­si­ble for my fail­ure, that it was about some­thing lack­ing in my char­ac­ter or skills, rather than about the mar­ket and the odds. If only… I had pub­lished more. If only… I had taken that job instead of that other one. If only… I was bet­ter at writ­ing cover let­ters. If only… my inter­ests were more mar­ketable. If only, if only, if only.

I feel like I was crip­pled, and that I still strug­gle with the effects of that now.

What kills me, par­tic­u­larly, is that the expe­ri­ence of that career trauma is what has made it so chal­leng­ing to move on. In some essen­tial way I feel dam­aged, and it car­ries over into all of my sub­se­quent efforts to remake myself and my career. An unfriendly mar­ket becomes a per­sonal career fail­ure becomes a per­sonal fail­ure, period.”

“Why should a young aspir­ing soft­ware pro­fes­sional spend four years and $200K+ to attend an insti­tu­tion that will teach them less about their cho­sen pro­fes­sion than 3 months of work­ing on a real project with tal­ented men­tors? Indeed, why should employ­ers pay $50K for under­trained pro­gram­mers who are sure to make hor­rific messes for the next three years of their career?

Con­sider instead a team of crafts­peo­ple. At the cen­ter of this team is a mas­ter pro­gram­mer. This is some­one who has been pro­gram­ming for two decades or more. This per­son under­stand sys­tems at a gut level, and can quickly make tech­ni­cal judge­ments with­out ago­niz­ing over them. Such a per­son can direct a team with the kind of calm con­fi­dence that only comes with years of expe­ri­ence and seasoning.”

“Can we learn any­thing from all this? Going back to the triumph-​​of-​​evil quote, we may ask, how can we defend our­selves from the bogus quote? It is clearly unrea­son­able for any­one to have to prove a quote bogus.…”