You have me beat, but I have a coworker who used paper tape. That is, computer data storage was via holes punched in a long strip of paper. Another coworker wrote Alternate Reality, which was a game for the Atari 800XL 8-bit home computer.
Finding these experienced people isn't easy. Many don't want to move. You can't just drop by a college and grab them in bulk. We'd hire more (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183 for "Who is hiring?" post) if we could just find them.
> You have me beat, but I have a coworker who used paper tape.
When I first learned to program (I was about 12), I was using paper tape and those old Bell teletypes, in a facility that still used punched cards.
Here's my punched card story -- I bumped a box with a card deck and it sent the cards flying, mixing them all up. The systems operator made me sort the cards by hand. It took me hours. It was a few months before I learned that they had a machine that would have done that for me automatically -- but the sysop had decided that I needed to learn a lesson (which I did, in fact, learn!)
Phoew that's cool! I have to say Opendoc always smelled wrong to me, so I stayed clear -- But I did implement the 'whose' descriptors in Applescript once, and I still have the scars to prove it :-)
I wrote a lot of "Apple Telecom 3.0" that ran on most "powerbooks" back in 1995+ or so, you know, modems, faxes, voice mails and all these very high tech stuff :-)
This is the Steve Jobs more young entrepreneurs need to know about and emulate. Not the "Jobs was an asshole and successful, therefor if I am an asshole I will also be successful" vision of Jobs. Or the "Jobs made pretty things and suckered people into paying too much for them" vision of Jobs.
Wow. I need to remember him taking that drink of water and giving himself time to respond. I respond way too quickly to things far too often. You can just see himself giving himself a second to collect himself. Brilliant.
I've always wanted to write a tool like Game Maker that was built, itself, on game design principles. Make a level, get XP. Game mechanics that synergize give you combo points, that you can "spend" on a Mechanical-Turk-like marketplace to get people to contribute 5-10 minutes of work on your game, or playtest it. Every time an A/B-tested-metric you've inserted moves positively, you unlock new premade-resource-packs. Etc.
I wonder if I'm the only one here who is completely font-blind? I never notice what font something is unless someone points it out, let alone being able to pick out 25 specific ones. I guess that makes me a poor candidate for being a designer, doesn't it!
Alas, typography is cursed by two common afflications in the design community:
1. Good typography does not draw attention to itself. Most people will only notice your typographical work when you get it wrong. When you get it right, the reader takes in the information and registers the mood without ever noticing the medium.
2. There are snobs, who will artificially exaggerate the differences between fonts to try to appear more knowledgeable. There are differences between fonts and they really can create very different results. However, sometimes there are two well-designed fonts that happen to be very similar, and you really could use either with good, professional-looking results. Arguing about which of these fonts is "better" invariably generates more heat than light.
In other words, if you're not a trained designer, you're supposed to be font-blind. And if you are a trained designer, your reader should be font-blind. If they are noticing the details of which font you use, you're probably not doing a very good job.
no, it's a learned skill. Mostly you get better at it by a) using them and b) reading about them. It took me about two years of minor curiosity and looking up at things before i definitively spotted my first random non-system font.
The key, and this is important, fonts have historical baggage and they also are designed by relatively few people. After doing this, you start to see designer-traits and also historical influences. The hardest thing to see is white-space, which is another "i know kung fu" moment.
I always compare this to football (or 'soccer') fans who always seem to know an impossibly large amount on the subject compared to me. I guess it's just what you're in to — I suppose the same goes for music and movies.
I think bittorrent is most effective towards the head end of the distribution spectrum, rather than the tail, where you're more likely to see dead torrents with no seeders, presuming you can find a torrent at all.
It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the label of being a Y-Combinator startup.
This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.
There has to be a better way to raise optimism about a release that has been continually delayed, other than to start soliciting public user feedback as to what the medium term plans for the development schedule should be?
> I don't know exactly how his experiment would turn out.
I'm sure there would be correlation, but I suspect that it would be very far from perfect, possibly because of talent or inadvertently (or deliberately) discovering better and more effective ways to practice.
I'm reminded me of when I was a kid and played chess with a friend a lot. At first I could beat him and we played about the same amount but suddenly he inexplicably got far better than me. It bugged the hell out of me:)
So I think the result of Adams' "lesson" would actually be to teach people that they have strengths and weaknesses, and practice helps a lot, but it will (rather quickly) get swamped by talent in any realistic endeavor. And results might also be strongly affected by effective coaching or acquiring specific knowledge to make those hours of practice dramatically more effective.
I'd love to read your list. :)