kindwarrior's Comments

Did Reagan End the Era of Free Markets?

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:59:18 -0400

@hook:

Can't speak for mister Kim but I'm a big fan of Reagan. That does not mean that a well intentioned executive decision could not have evolved into something less than desirable.

We have seen throughout the history of our country systematic large scale attacks on our currency. It would seem prudent, in the emergence of high speed trading, to assemble experts on currency and financial markets to do threat assessment and propose systematic countermeasures. It is also easy to see how such a group could be perverted into the ultimate "insiders" club.

We are over centralized and ultimately, if the federal government is not divested of power, it will be our undoing. The solution to currency attacks and market swings has always been, will always be, diversity. If we want to protect ourselves from financial swings we need to devaluate brokers, and dispose of the Federal reserve. The momentum of a pendulum is directly correlated to its mass.

That being said, I object to Mr. Kim expounding on a mountain of circumstantial evidence w/o citing a single pebble of that mountain. It is clear that Markets have been manipulated on a large scale over the last 10 years or so. It is not so clear that this has anything to do with Executive order 12631. The name George Soros comes up a lot, does he have anything to do with financial markets?

Apple Hits $200, Rumors Abound

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:30:32 -0500

Well, I couldn't find my comment or the article but someone on Seeking Alpha wrote an article (before Leopard came out) stating that Apple would not go above $200 before January; I wrote back that while I wouldn't make a bet of it staying above $200, that I'd jump at a bet that it'd at least blip across the $200 mark before Jan. Sadly, the challenge was unanswered but I'd have won by the skin of my teeth.

Beijing's Hybrid Hypocrisy

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:27:04 -0400

I suppose it's going to be impossible not to offend with this but as soon as I saw the term "Carbon Footprint" you lost all credibility with me. You may want to bury such group think non-sense deeper in your articles if you want to be taken seriously.

Apple's Numbers: Innovative, User-Friendly Spreadsheet Application

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 14:48:53 -0400

You have to love wikipedia

I remember "Glider Pro" it was written by a fellow HyperCard developer "John Calhoon". Your reference made me do some web research. John did in fact sell the game to Casady & Green (and yes I did misspell it above). There's an article on the game here.

This caused my to search for "Spreadsheet 2000" and, sure enough, there's an article here (with a screen shot and a mention of Prograph)

The Prograph link will take you here where you can learn that the idea of prograph is not entirely dead. According to the article BTW the author of Prograph was Pictoius not Peregrine -- I may simply have been wrong here but something vague in my memory is telling me that there's more to the story.

Apple's Numbers: Innovative, User-Friendly Spreadsheet Application

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:43:21 -0400
Back in the days of free market software, there was a company named Cassedy & Greene (Cassedy may be misspelled) that created a product called "SpreadSheet 2000" for the MacOS; It was an ingenious concept you had a canvas (actually you could have multiple canvases and layers) that you added tables, buttons text or other draw objects (ovals, bursts, squares, etc). The tables could be sized and styled independently and cells, rows, columns (or indeed) whole tables could be referenced in other tables by option dragging from the source to the destination. Borrowing a metaphor from Apple's OpenDoc a line would stretch from the source to the destination, if for some reason the connection could not be made the line would retreat back to the source with an animated failing about to communicate to the user that the connection had failed. Spreadsheet 2000 was really a delight to use and I was surprised how much less stressful it was to play around with independent tables than it was to worry about how to format my spreadsheet so that formulas would break should I decide to add a banner (among other minor stress inducing issues regarding formatting on one big grid). Sadly, it lacked many key features (most annoyingly there was no way to turn off the border around tables) and so in my mind it was nothing more than a very successful proof of concept -- it's good to see the idea come back.

An interesting aside: Spreadsheet 2000 was written in an obscure programming language called Prograph which was a total departure from other programming languages; I experimented with Prograph; It took a while to get accustomed to the metaphor: inputs were represented as nodes (little circles) at the top of a project window, outputs as little circles at the bottom processes were little hexagonal icons that you dragged into the window and connected to inputs and outputs. The right side (I may have this reversed) of the hexagon could be double clicked to show the processes methods (the definitions of it's inputs and outputs) the double clicking the other side opened up a project window for that process -- and that's all there was to the language. It was impossible to make a syntax error in Prograph since you were just dragging lines and icons around. Inputs and outputs could auto-validate while connecting them (can't connect a string output to a number input). The language was intrinsically multi-threaded (in fact, you needed to draw a special connecting line if and I/O connection could not be allowed to be executed in parallel with other processes -- because, perhaps it needed data from another process that may or may not have executed). I have been convinced since working with Prograph that it is the right way to build programs but, like Spreadsheet 2000 it was never widely adopted therefore the libraries were small which probably meant you'd end up having to use some other language in conjunction with Prograph to get anything meaningful done so the technology languished. The 90s was a period where Microsoft prospered by breaking emerging standards. If you knew some Microsoft engineers during that time then you've surely heard the "Embrace and destroy" joking comments or, my favorite, "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" although that dates me. What this meant to the small emerging developer's like Cassedy and Greene and Peregrine (the makers of Prograph) was that they could not afford the endless revision cycles necessary to keep their tools running on the shifting sands that were the underlying standards of the '90s let alone advance the quality of their products. Ultimately they died.

I'm cautiously hopeful about Apple's iWork suite, Google’s web productivity suite and the open source projects that are trying to compete with Microsoft now. Microsoft can no longer "own" the standards and people are innovating again. Having worked with the Newton, OpenDoc, Spreadsheet 2000, and Prograph, I cannot help but wonder what marvelous tools we would have now if we had somehow prevented the Microsoft monopoly. It has been my life lesson from my involvement in the industry that even while governments, and banks and Financial houses love monopolies (and monopolies need all three to exist) the free market doesn't and ultimately, the way water breaks a boulder, free markets tear monopolies apart. None of this of course erases the damage they do during their reign.