I would argue the result depends 90% on mentality. Experience only makes you work faster.
Fun conversation with a high end coder: ME: I would write it from scratch rather than introduce a dependency. It's not that I don't trust people but I just don't trust people to live up to the specific standards for the specific job. HIM: For what I cost no way I could justify that. ME: It looks like a circus this thing of yours. HIM: Keep the secret!
In the Netherlands anyone may do the wiring of their house themselves but if it is a substantial modification (or an entire installation) a certified electrician has to sign off on it. They are not likely to stick their neck out for any funny business.
That said, I've seen plenty of work from experienced certified electricians that was complete garbage. Not just a few things, more than half their work.
Things like, they cut half way though the wire removing insulation. When you pull the socket out of the wall the wire breaks. So you have to strip it again but they also cut it to short so you have to pull a new wire into the tube. Then you discover the tube is a bunch of segments behind the wall or it has multiple sharp 90 degree corners and the wire wont move or the new wire wont go in. Then you have to open up the walls, new plaster, new paint, do you want one wall with wall paper that doesn't match or will you go for new wall paper for the entire house/floor? All because they did multiple terrible things.
I'm not an electrician, just a DIY enthusiast (and the parent commenter) - but in North American construction, romex in conduit is basically unheard of in residential builds - it's stapled to the framing during construction, so once you cut wire short, you've immediately put yourself in a pickle.
I don’t think they implied Romex? Conduit is mandatory in multi-family construction here in San Francisco, but they just use armored cable, not romex in conduit.
I think you had 999 pages but each page could have 9999 sub pages.
The pages were send one by one so if you typed 200 you would have to wait for page 200 to cycle by. If it had 100 sub pages you would have to wait 100 times as long. I believe more important pages could be send more often or similarly the cycle would skip less important pages. Decent TV's would just store pages and sub pages until the next cycle.
I asked crappy local TV stations what a page would cost but they didn't have anything under 1500 guilders per month (comparable to $1500 today) which was an absurd amount of money for 1kb of hosting.
No wonder that, besides news, subtitles and the tv guide, the thing was entirely filled with lottery phone lines, astrology lines, sex lines and similar trash.
Original article author here: Yes, key pages were multiple times over teletext. It's a bit of a grey area for amateur radio regs, so I didn't mention it in the article, but you could use the software with say, an license-free part 15 short wave FM transmitter, to send an entire carousel of many pages. As such the code does have an option to flag ket pages and specify how many times they should be repeated over a carousel's broadcast.
I remembered my grand vision for teletext. All pages should be dedicated to a text based rpg using the Choose Your Own Adventure mechanic[0]
People want to fight orcs and goblins, ride dragons, cast magic missile and save the princess.
That (using teletext) one can update the plot dynamically makes for a fun creative challenge. Should probably draw a giant flow chart with the 999 states. When all pages are used you have to remove things before you can add things.
Viewing the fee as being for a volume of storage doesn't seem the right perspective. It's $1500 to lease some %age of spectrum for some period. If true Teletext on an analogue signal and broadcast vs cable, then $1500 for 0.05% of the total non-media spectrum doesn't feel like a terrible deal.
$1500 today is probably in the region of 10s of GB, sure, but that's almost a commodity volume by comparison in terms of supply.
The way I thought of it at the time was that they had 2 kinds of content, official stuff like news, to make the service actually useful, for which they didn't get a cent and commercial stuff which started at that unfunny amount. They had nothing in between.
For example, I could have made a page with sub-pages with the menu from various restaurants in town. It didn't occur to me that one could monopolize delivery and squeeze restaurants into handing over a large amount of money per meal. (read: cut a large amount of food) I'm not that kind of entrepreneur. I'm sure they do actually pay ƒ1500 now for a dumb listing on a food delivery website. I thought of it as more of a fun thing to have for the local tv station (that hardly anyone watched)
I was just fooling around really but my main plan at the time was classifieds. The normal formula for those at the time was to deliver the text some place and pay in cash. I had considered a paid phone number but those also cost 1500 + 50% of the call cost. A 3 minute call would work out to cost 3 bucks of which I would get ƒ1.50 and I would need 1000 per month just to pay for the phone line. Absurd prices, local (land line) calls at the time cost 10 cents each for unlimited duration and 35 guilders every 2 months.
For a TV station with less than 100 k "viewers" I don't expect many thousands of classifieds. It wouldn't even fit on the page. Say you can fit 10 of them. Say 300 one day ads per month. As a customer, I wouldn't pay ƒ5 per day. The local newspaper started at ƒ6 and the text will stay there for the entire week.
In the US there were some experiments on delivering high-volume content by broadcasting, say, a 30-second spot which flashed dozens or hundreds of images and you were supposed to record it on videotape and play it back frame-by-frame.
There was one local channel here which pointed a camera at a fishtank while idle; if you wanted a specific data package, you called a number to request it. I think the high-water mark for the concept was a few national ads where they said "we'll broadcast the entire Chevrolet catalogue at the top of the hour, have your VCR ready." The problem being, you had to run a second advertisement to get the audience ready for the first one!
One fun trick I learn (or more like two tricks) is to start working with the person during the interview. If you do a lot of interviews you get to see a lot of different ways to do it. Their job is to do interviews but they never get to see how others do it. You can tell them what they are doing right, what interesting approaches others take, what you would do and how they can improve.
If I notice they cant talk about improving the way they do things I cant get out of there fast enough. It's one of those places where everything goes wrong but you have to actively pretend it's not.
I always counter the question by asking them why they are uniquely interested in me. That way they usually skip the question. (You should still have an answer ready for all of the obvious questions)
From what I gather it is hard to hire the highest level developers because they hate the endless meetings, bureaucracy and micromanagment. Salaries are comparable to industry which seems quite high for dutch standards but if you make education hard and expensive with unreasonable time constraints and little adjustment to demand you are just going to end up enforcing scarcity which calls for even higher salaries. We also continue to suffer from managerialism. It makes it strange to pay someone building stuff more than someone managing them.
What is called culture here will increasingly be propaganda. It reminds me of people cheering twitter as a replacement of RSS or using facebook to communicate with your customers rather than email. You won't know which will be the winning company, don't know who might control it in the future and we cant predict what it will cost. It doesn't take much to be very annoying.
One can get used to quite strange life styles. One could be very active, drink nothing but coffee and alcohol. If they feel a bit sluggish thats just normal. If one gets used to being sluggish (from any deficiency) fixing it might make sleeping difficult or one ends up working harder than one should. If the job is a mindless grind gaining mental clarity might feel terrible.
Fun conversation with a high end coder: ME: I would write it from scratch rather than introduce a dependency. It's not that I don't trust people but I just don't trust people to live up to the specific standards for the specific job. HIM: For what I cost no way I could justify that. ME: It looks like a circus this thing of yours. HIM: Keep the secret!
reply