My apology, Laurence. I was talking with a customer named Loren shortly before I wrote my comments. At first I wrote your name as his, then looked again, but obviously not very well. Anyway, I’ve corrected it.

I agree with your comment about the folks here. This site offers a number of view points from talented folks.

There is an element of self-satisfaction from helping a project to come together. It has a very powerful appeal to a lot of folks. One Note is a curious app. I don’t know if you know of or ever used a product called Framework. It was made by Ashton-Tate, and employed multiple work objects within a tabbed layout display. Framework didn’t permit input of all media, but for the time it was hugely popular with a number of industries as it integrated serial communication, programming, word processing, database, and was about the best of spread sheets around, plus did graphics and some proportional font related presentation. It was darned near a complete operating system with a nicely developed API, performed memory management and did a lot of things very well. One Note is similar to Framework, but does show 12 years of progress. I wonder if Ashton-Tate would still be around if they didn’t give up pursuing new ideas and products rather than spending most of their $$ on law suits over dbase platform. They were a really good candidate to become what Microsoft ultimately did, and almost always pushed hard on the innovative front. Anyway, if you keep a lot of notes and they are scattered throughout several documents, give One Note a try, i haven't come across anyone that doesn't like it.

While on the road yesterday, I thought about your comment about Napster et al and how new killer apps are born of a confluence of technologies, and it occurred to me that something similar, but different would provide a solution to many of our transportation problems. This is a rough 1st pass but here it is: The personal transport is popular because the convenience can’t be beat, and also because of the aesthetic value. But it is expensive and will only become much more so. The convenience issue is tough to get around.

Were someone to put together a fleet of, say 5,000 vans (or pick a fairly large number), each complete with GPS, keyboard, and 2 way computer communications and remote input ability. These vehicles would be used to transport folks and their normal baggage (anything from a pack to a bike), and maybe even for cross town shipping. For the sake of coolness put nice, heated seats and fit the vehicle to lux standards.

Say someone wants a ride. They go to a convenient computer, and schedule their starting and ending point, along with what they want to transport. This information gets entered into a database. The database knows the location of the vehicles, and all the routes scheduled. The database then picks a vehicle which is a) in the area, b) isn’t too backed up (and can even state the ETA). The selected vehicle gets sent to the pick-up spot where the riders get a comfy seat, maybe even coffee or a beverage, access to a computer, TV, radio, and with few or no routes takes them to their destination. Payment would be based on some practical means. The key is that by the combined use of GPS, routing databases and computer communications, there would be nearly the efficiency of time compared to driving, but would probably cost far less than owning even a nice vehicle.

I’m sure there are projects similar to this, if not, there ought to be. 5,000 upscale transports would probably remove 100,000 vehicles from the road. The more transports the less time folks would be obligated to wait, which is probably the major disincentive for public transport.

In Seattle we’re in the death throws of a monorail project turned too expensive for even the democrats to tolerate. The price tag was about 11 billion, including interest, for a scant, 14 mile run, for which the city needed a 50 year tax schedule to pay for it. For a tiny fraction of the cost of the monorail, the approach outlined above could move more folks and offer greater convenience to almost any white elephant approach. The beauty of it is that the tools are all there, and just need to be assembled.

Comments?

Public transportation tends to work very well in very large cities due to the relatively short distances involved, the great number of people going to roughly the same place, and the cost of parking. Trains, cabs, etc. are just more economical. However, most of the country is such that the length of travel, people going to the same place, and cost of parking is not suitable for anything but personal transportation.

I think that what you have hit on is a more common issue when dealing with technology. The software and hardware is out there but companies often do not have inhouse experts that understand what is possible and how to go about putting together what they need. Any change costs a lot of money and technology is no exception. Combine that with a huge uncertainty and nothing is going to happen.

What you have described is used to schedule airline flight routes, frequencies, etc. There is no reason that the same thing couldn't be done for "luxury transports" in large cities. The problem is getting a cab company that is 1. big enough 2.innovative enough to realize the benefits of graph theory :) .

A lot of the companies that were moved overseas were started here by immigrants and it was only natural that they would move home when they could make more money there. In fact much of the boom in silicon valley was driven by companies that were founded by immigrants.

Many of the CS grads will be offered jobs at much smaller salaries than stated in this thread. Many of the jobs that pay more are in areas with living expenses so high that it makes more sense to work a lower paying job in an area with lower living expenses and higher quality of living.

What works for a few people is anecdotal and doesn't represent a trend that people can use to plan their future.

The myth of the "computer genius" hurts this as a career choice. The idea that some people are born with computer skills turns away people who find that they really have to work to develop computer skills.

If you don't enjoy doing puzzles, you probably won't make a very good programmer. My personal observation only.

This is from salary.com for Washington DC:

Client/Server Programmer I 25th%ile Median 75th%ile
Washington, DC $51,071 $57,156 $64,998

A lot of students that I know work for Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and they usually start at $51K-$54K and actually the cost of living for them is about the same as here because they commute. In NYC it is sort of the same story. Take a train into the city and live on the outskirts.

The model I was thinking of was from a program called win mx. The key element was that you could observe the backlog for a given source, and about how long before it would be available, plus schedule the delivery ASAP. Far from ideal, but okay for a basis.

But combine a similar UI with a means of sending routing to the driver. Not just routing to the pick up point, but also the destination. Add enough distraction for the passengers and you’d have to think it’d be a hit. The trick would be a big enough project to get an idea of how it works in say a 100 square mile area.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a letter to Gates and our gov and ask them to look into it. Put the two of em together and they have the means to experiment along with the great a pilot area. MS is one of the proponents of increased mass transit anyway. So I'm sure Bill would shortly launch ms commuter route. Maybe we can get DC in on it and they’d use modified Sprinter vans!

My own take is that this kind of solution will be necessary within 10 years max. There is no sense in putting together a hugely expensive and completely novel solution, such as a monorail, when it’s far cheaper and more efficient to continue to leverage the current roadway infrastructure.

As to folks not wanting to try, that, sadly is emblematic of the USA today. Its easier to seek more of the same, than to even try something useful. At what point is it so important to maintain the status quo that we give up everything for it? In turn the answer to this question takes us right back to the comments on the top of this thread.