davo11

I never said anything about forcing people into shelters. My point was by providing a basic level of social security the tent city could be avoided. In Australia there are still some homeless living under bridges and so on, this can't be prevented, but we have no tent cities (except for the occasional political protests).

There are some shelters run by charity groups for the remaining homeless, who provide food and shelter for the night if so required. Most of these people have mental disorders / drug problems / or homeless kids who've left home, and there are mechanisms that help these as best as possible, but it's not 100% successful. Most of them choose to find a shelter for the night.

This situation is different from the one that creates the tent cities. From the interviews these are people who lost their jobs because of the economic collapse. Shouldn't a 21st century society provide some sort of safety net for these people so they can maintain some diginity?

I agree that it's not possible to calculate an economy. I was talking on a personal level, a rational person in a situation where at any time they may lose their job and be thrown on the streets will save and put aside enough money to survive for a reasonable amount of time. However if you're already living hand to mouth, you lose your job, the bank forecloses on your house and you're out on the street, well it seems in the US it's tent city here I come. Many of the people are victims of an economic event out of everyones control. A social security safety net would prevent tent cities from happening. Which is the greatest cost to a society - having citizens living in tents without any sanitation or health care, which will increase crime and health care needs - or provide all citizens with a safety net of a subsistence wage?

Why would it be a cage? Isn't the idea of a free society is that it is a society? A group of responsible adults could agree that events could occur which result in people having to live on the streets for no reason of their own. I agree with some forethought these events could be planned for, but this is the sense of noblesse oblige. It recognises that not all people in the community are able to plan with the same level of forethought, and that the resources they have to work with will forbid this level of planning. And so a wealthy society can afford to look after all people if they so desire. If they wish to opt of the safety net then that is fine, I don't see how it's a cage.

Some homeless people are mentally ill but this isn't a reason to not have a social safety net. There used to be a term 'noblesse oblige' where the more fortunate are duty bound to look after those less fortunate, to my mind this is where a social security net is required.

Some people will for one reason or another, whether by bad luck or plain old stupidity will end up at some point in there life out on the streets. If these people have kids then the kids end up on the streets and no longer receive an education, so they'll end up as criminals or on drugs or something like that. If this cycle is allowed to continue you end up with large areas of slums in cities. If instead when bad things happen there is a security net that allows you to wipe yourself down, get up and move on then the cycle is avoided, or at least it's depth is less. It can become a social welfare problem, but at least you don't have children dying in tents from exposure, and there's always the chance that when things pick up, they'll be able to get a job or at least the children do.

Isn't there any sort of social welfare if you're unemployed in the US? I'm in Australia, and if you're unemployed here you get an allowance from the government, it's not much but enough to keep you able to share the rent with a couple of people and so on, so no one has to live in tents or die from exposure in the year 2009.

There are a small percentage that abuse the system, but not many and most view it as an acceptable price to pay for a social security net. To receive it you have to do so many hours of community service after a number of weeks, which minimises abuse of the system. But then we also have free medical if you need it to. If you're really on the skids the government will provide housing even. I believe this is the same in the UK and some other european countries, the UK is where we got it from.

The total laissez-faire system has it's up and down sides, which really aren't necessary in the 21st Century imho.

"the crash of 1873, the Great Depression—have a way of upending the geopolitical order, and hastening the fall of old powers and the rise of new ones."

There has been much ado about the US failures, but the failures in the UK seem even more serious. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere as the focus seems to be on the US, as is usual, but this is the last nail in the coffin for the UK as far as I can see, after this it will be an island off Europe that spends its time talking about the old empire.

What about javascript's dynamic object model, where the objects can be changed at run time? I don't think this was possible earlier on, can't remember if this was possible in smalltalk or self?

The idea of the DOM?

Both mid 90's

type inferencing as used in haskell et al, that's a fairly recent development - early 90's/late 80's?

Category theory is another perhaps - it's from the 40's but it's application to programming is new - 80's perhaps?

both these are outgrowths of C++ features - templates and rtti, which I saw first in the early 80's but were probably around earlier.

Try a maths for engineers course at your local Uni. If you don't want to or can't enrol, you could probably just sneak in up the back and take notes, I've done this in the past for courses I was just curious about, lecturers usually don't mind. often they enjoy it - someone who actually wants to learn!

There may be something of interest here too, this is the link to Itunes U in ITunes,

http://deimos3.apple.com/indigo/main/main.xml

Is that available in all browsers?

I spent much time researching why the tables are bad camp exists, and this is the result of my research:

The beginning

Initially tables were the only way to layout a web page, and so much abuse occured - this was before CSS and the only way to make a layout was to use 'spacer' gifs. spacer gifs were one pixel gifs that you had to put in td elements so they would retain there shape. As you can imagine this was a mess.

Then came CSS and the DIV tag, many books were written about 'spacer gifs were evil' use Divs and CSS, and this was correct spacer gifs were a nightmare.

However what seems to have happened is the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Tables are the easiest way to do what's now called 'liquid layout'. You can do these using Div's but it takes a bit of fiddling, and the result can sometimes be wrong if the screen width becomes too small.

From a software development point of view I regard using div's for liquid layout as an optimisation - semantically what you want is a spaced layout that resizes dynamically. However, using tables does cause a couple of problems that div's avoid (which I mention below), div's avoid these problems but at a cost (which I also mention below).

The real crunch was early on - Netscape 4.7 (the one that was widely used) crashed with multiple nested tables (try this on browsershots if you're curious). So Div's were used and techniques for using div's in browsers became prevalent.

The combination of the Netscape problems and spacer gifs created the 'tables are bad' thing and new developers coming in were told 'tables are bad' and it continues.

So people used div's and IE6 became the dominant browser, but the engineers who built IE6 never expected anyone to use divs for layout - that's what tables were for - and so the mess occured with div's and css and IE6. This, I think, made the situation worse, as to use div's meant you could MS bash, it also required a deeper understanding of HTML and CSS and so arose the specialist web designers who used multiple incantations in DIV tags and CSS to create what any joe could do in 5 minutes using table tags. This strengthened the DIV/CSS camp until anyone who used table tags was openly scorned as a newb.

In any argument you have with the DIV people the last one they always bring up when they're on the ropes is that braille readers can't handle tables - because the ordering isn't defined. However most of these people don't actually write for disabled readers and this too seems to be without base, I have asked many times for concrete examples, and never have received any.

There are some negatives with tables:

1) The whole page needs to be loaded before it can be rendered (in some cases), as the layout can't be done until the contents of each cell are known.

2) This seems to be a big one - it's very hard to edit nested tables in notepad and figure out where you are, you need more expensive tools to navigate the document, something web developers seem to be averse to for some reason. Me, I buy whatever tools make my life easier.

The negatives with Div's as layout are there too:

1) If you have a few fixed width div's with the rightmost floating (the usual way) and make the page smaller than the width of the div's the rightmost falls below the other div's, it's not possible to stop this from happening. If you use tables a scroll bar appears.

2) You have to have a deep understanding of CSS and a lot of time to experiment on multiple browsers to see what works

Div's can start to display quicker as they have a fixed width usually and so no layout algorithm is required to be calculated. (The actual time to calculate the layout is no longer an issue, but it used to be for tables).

So that's the issues as I see them, and how we ended up with these two camps. If anyone has some more data I'd like to see it. Personally I use a couple of layers of nested tables to establish the rows and columns and fill it up with div's as necessary, and don't worry too much any more. Oh and use styles to actually describe the TABLE/TR and TD elements, which is CSS as far as I can see.

+1 (alumni)

By lodging a provisional and having a released product that implements the invention, I believe no one else can patent that invention, even if you don't proceed with the patent. Ask your lawyer. A patent search will reveal if someone else has patented this already and would be a bit cheaper. Also shop around and get quotes from a couple of lawyers.

If you'd like to get advice from other inventors there's usually an inventors association nearby. Expect every opinion under the sun, but it may help. Usually there are experienced inventors who donate their time to help out new inventors and just jawbone.

I'm in the same boat, my provisional runs out in April, and am wondering what to do. I lodged the provisional myself and save a few $K.

Here's my current thinking, over the course of the patent it will cost around $250K or more over 20 years. If I had $250K now would I spend it on my patent? Right now, I'd much rather have the $250K so from the good investment point of view - the answer is no.

What about the possibility of someone else patenting it? Well since the provisional has been lodged I don't think that's possible once the product is in the public domain, so from that angle I'm safe.

Can someone reverse engineer the patented bit? If they can what investment would they have to make to build a competing product, i.e. are there any other bits that aren't in the patent but are hard / risky. If a competitor has to make a large investment to catch up to you, then they may be better off just buying your company.

Will this be the only invention you ever make? If you're young and you've got something patentable already then most likely it wont be your last. It's not my first and I know it's not my last, once an inventor - always an inventor.

Someone mentioned it's good to have a patent on the resume, from my experience it can scare the hell out of some employers, so that's a bit of a 2 edged sword.

Perhaps the bit that get's stuck the most in my craw is that I'd be paying thousands of dollars to some patent guys who sit in a nice office and wear expensive suits and silk ties while I'm busting a gut making a startup, it's petty I know but it really gives me pause. I figure if they have all that money then there is a lot of cream on top of the patent industry.

The other thing to consider is how much time it takes to write a patent application. I know for myself it was a few weeks to actually write the provisional (and this was time well spent as I defined what I'd actually invented and found out a few other things along the way). It also takes time to work with the patent guys, don't underestimate this. You have to have meetings, review there work, make changes and so on.

I figure if my products successful, then by the time it reaches the point where I had to worry about patent infringements and so on I will have made more than enough money for me and I'll be doing this to grow to the next step.It usually takes about 5 years for a patent to be approved, 5 years is a long time in software.

The conclusion I've come to is it's a big boys game, and if you want to play then you have to pony up the cash, either get the cash or get investors who have the cash otherwise do what you can to protect yourself and move on. Of course it depends totally on what you're patenting - if it's a major breakthrough then it may be worth getting investors. If it's incremental then execution probably matters way more than whether or not you have a patent.

hth.

Managing Director.

Hay it's fun handing out business cards and seeing double takes - there has to be some reward to working for nothing at the moment. I must admit it felt a bit silly at first, but I preferred it to CEO, Managing Director has a solidity to it I like, which counteracts the nebulousness of IT/Web stuff a bit. Owner / Chief Architect were others I tossed up. MD seemed to be the best.

pilates is great for back strength - it focuses on your 'core' muscles that keep your back straight.

I dunno, it's more like I've fallen off the end of the world. Previously I was a corporate consultant, so I did incomprehensible things but I worked for a large company so it must make sense. Now I do incomprehensible things but not only that I do them in an incomprehensible way, and I'm enjoying it, it must be evil somehow (irish catholic background), but I'll take on the many suggestions here and try them out.

That was probably my point moving to a Mac from a PC is a large investment, you'd need to have very good reasons to do so. Personally I spend so much time in applications/ide's that the OS really doesn't matter much.

Now that you say that, until recently I resisted calling myself an entrepeneur, it does have a lot of negative connotations. I'm past that and now I probably should try and drag some of them along with the dream, they'll be kicking and screaming - at first anyway - but it's a whole lot better than grinding my teeth.

I'm not in America - I'm in Australia, There are entrepenuers here but it's not an accepted way of life like it seems to be in the US. If you have a shop front / product it seems acceptable, but people seem to have a hard time accepting that you sit at home writing software is work - and hard work, and that you can make money from it.

It actually scares a lot of people it seems, maybe it's just my family.

You're probably right. You'd think with all the marketing brains and intellect here someone would have come up with an incantation.

Think about the software too. I see you use Adobe CS3 and MS Office, so you'll have to buy new licenses of each of these, unless you're running them in a VM.

I looked at moving to a Mac just like you are and after looking at the hardware and software costs, I could by myself a separate linux server as well as a new PC for about the same price as a Mac. You're also limiting yourself in the hardware you can buy by using a mac, no more upgrading the video card if you feel like it, or getting a $40 digital TV receiver, no more plugging in a RAID array on the weekend, the number of third party accessories is smaller and there a lot more expensive. Also the amount of free utilities for the Mac is a lot less (I use a bunch of little free PC utilities, that have seeped in over time, and would take a lot of time to replace). I have 2 monitors at the moment and thinking of getting a third - can the Mac support a third? not sure. There's a lot you take for granted in the PC world that you give up if you move to the Mac world. The Mac hardware is a closed proprietry system and all the negatives that come with that are there, but I do agree it's nice and shiny and I just want to touch them :-).

So I'm buying a little Mac laptop to play with (officially for the kids) and keeping my development on PC's. If you want to dip your toes (to see what all the hoo ha is about) the Mac mini could be an option too. hth.