didgetmaster

6 ms·

91.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
How possible is it these days to build a software business that is 'self-sustaining on their own revenue' without some decent funding up front?
92.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think OP is suggesting that you actually create all the PPT slides and document everything before building a prototype or otherwise taking steps to start building a workable product. But if the idea isn&#x
93.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
It sounds very similar to things like oil production, gold mining, and even farming. When the price is high, everyone wants in on the action. As supply explodes, the prices drop. Once prices get low enough, the costs to pump the next barrel
94.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
There is no reason why a single data management system cannot be built that can do everything that either a file system or a database can do (I have been building one). It is an object store called Didgets (i.e. Data Widgets). Each Didget h
95.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
This is a common dark pattern. Go through the hassle of disabling some 'feature' or service; and it just magically reappears at the next 'update'. Microsoft is just one of the companies that routinely does stuff like tha
96.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
How long until the AI companies start charging more to people who use AI services, but live in areas that do things like this? NIMBY causes energy prices to go up in areas that won't allow drilling, refining, nuclear or nat gas develop
97.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
What worries me is that good, efficient code will no longer be widely shared like before. Everyone will just write their own inefficient version of a general purpose function or library because Claude or some other AI coder made it cheap
98.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
An important element that Willison left out of his definition of 'good code' is efficient! Software has an amazing multiplier effect. It can be copied to millions of machines and run billions of times each day. Code that wastes re
99.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
That is great advice if you set out to build a profitable business on day one. But it seems to me that there are many projects out there like mine. You start building something because it scratches an itch you have. You think it would be fu
100.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Jobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing. I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have
101.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
I wonder if someone in Fance recently saw the Die Hard movie where thieves robbed the Federal Reserve Bank in NY.
102.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Struggling to meet our basic needs is not a recent phenomenon. It has been a part of the human condition for millenia, not just decades. Some people think that if we can just eliminate our 'struggles' by building AI tools to do th
103.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
If you hand a broken calculator to someone who knows how to do math, and they entered 123 + 765 which produced an answer of 6789; they should instantly know something is wrong. Hand that calculator to someone who never understood what the t
104.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Just what we need...AI agents that will play our games for us!
105.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
It mirrors the venture capital business. Invest in 100 projects. Know that 90 of them will likely fail, 7 or 8 will break even, and just 2 or 3 will succeed. Hope that the successful ones are big enough to cover all the losses of the others
106.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Obviously. It was a joke.
107.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
The EXIF data says that the picture was taken with the flash off! How did they get the Earth to light up when it is obviously dark outside? Is this fake?
108.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Our UI guy (a good friend of mine from college) did a really good job of making our DOS app look like a windows app. The first version of our disk imaging product (Drive Image) was not so polished because I was the only one working on both
109.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Since we had to shift (i.e. copy) blocks of data around in order to dynamically resize partitions that were formatted with FAT, NTFS, or HPFS file systems; we had to know the internal structures of each of them. It's been a long time,
110.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Merci
111.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
I joined the startup making PartitionMagic after I saw a prototype. I had just wasted another half day repartitioning my 80MB hard drive so I could dual boot OS/2 while working at Novell.
112.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
This problem has been around for decades. An application installer doesn't just copy some files to a few directories. It may put them in hundreds of different places. In addition, it adds entries to the registry or other system files.
113.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Thank you and to all the others who remember and liked PartitonMagic. It makes an old programmer feel good to know that something he worked on 30 years ago made a difference. BTW: I am currently working on a hobby project called Didgets. It
114.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
I mainly mentioned it that way because once the company (PowerQuest) was bought out by Symantec, the product was mostly abandoned. Unlike Google, most programmers younger than 30 have never heard of it.
115.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
I also headed up a disk imaging product for the same company called Drive Image. It wasn't quite as popular, but it was fun to develop as well.
116.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
Glad you liked it. I still have fond memories of working on it.
117.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions. Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product. I am old, but I miss the days when the install proc
118.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
This is what scares me the most about AI. You have a handful of really big companies trying to outdo each other as they race to implement it and deploy it as quickly as possible. To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data
119.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
I have heard that you can speed up your favorite compression algorithm by 1000x, if you are not so concerned about what happens when you try to decompress it.
120.
by didgetmaster 6mo ago
>At the global level, 2025 also saw a sharp rebound in non-renewable additions, which nearly doubled compared to 2024," IRENA noted. China led that drive, with 100 GW of non-renewable capacity added last year, most of which was coal

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