I own pavlovian.net. I don't run my own mail server, I pay a company a small amount per year to do it for me. I have everything at pavlovian dot net. If my email provider goes out of business, that's OK - I'll find another one and point pavlovian dot net to that. If my email provider starts putting up big spam filters that I don't want, or adds mandatory "features" that I don't want, or starts injecting advertisements into my e-mail, I can, again, just move it.
I own pavlovian dot net email and I can do anything I want with it.
I also run a Jabber server at pavlovian dot net. Anyone on a different jabber server can send me IMs. Again, I'm safe from companies going out of business, or being corrupted, or just deciding they don't like me anymore. I can keep this jabber server up as long as I want, and I have full control over it.
I also have an AIM name.
If AOL decides to ban me, I lose contact with many friends. If AOL goes out of business and shuts down AIM, I lose contact with many friends. I used to have to look at ads, but thanks to Trillian that's no longer the case - of course, once in a while AOL blocks Trillian in one way or another and I have to wait for Trillian to fix it.
Personally, I'd love to do all my chatting over Jabber. If it's over Jabber, I'm not relying on any company besides myself - I can always just move my server if I need to. Spam? Yeah, spam will be a problem. I personally get no IM spam, though some of my friends get quite a bit. But we've got the same problem with e-mail, and I get perhaps one spam a week past my filters. (My email provider - the one I pay for - has massive financial incentive to have good spam filters. And they do. I suspect the same thing will be true of IM if Jabber becomes universal.)
To put it simply: Relying on a single company is bad, because companies can decide to turn evil and screw people over. Relying on yourself is good. I would rather rely on myself.
Ads. I think the various financial documents show that Google has been profitable for a while. You'd be astonished at how many people will pay enormous amounts of money for advertising.
Most of the responses to this are right - the more experienced coders simply don't bother. I personally probably would still compete just to go hang out with these people, except the competitions are always local so I just drive by and bum around in the hotel with them.:)
That said, there's also a lot of practice involved with this. I'm rusty and would probably drop out very early at this point - I just don't have the time to compete regularly (or, more precisely, it's not cost-effective for me.)
As for your competition, keep in mind that there's a lot of selection bias there - you're comparing "people we've already hired that have been working here for a while successfully" with "a bunch of people who may or may not have the faintest idea what they're doing".
While there is no cause-and-effect, there does appear to be some correlation - at least, if you want your coders to do research and solve previously unsolved problems. If you just want a code monkey, a highly-ranked Topcoder competitor is probably the last one you'd want to hire - he'd get bored and rewrite your database for fun.
('Course, it'd end up twice as fast and able to speak perfect English, but we'll ignore that for now.:) )
It's worth pointing out that a significant number of the best US competitive programmers already work at Google. Myself included, along with many of my co-workers.
You see less of a US force at the Google Code Jam simply because Google's already hired them.:)
Good thing it's impossible to place a bomb in a car, creating some kind of "car bomb". An invention like that would make all the expensive military preparation completely useless.
Personally, I think this thing should definitely be built, and if it's knocked down by terrorists (unlikely, but getting likelier IMHO), we should just build another. But, honestly . . . AA and jets ain't necessarily gonna help.
Sure, but even the military at least allocates their gobs of money sensibly. It's not like they spend ten billion on learning new pointy stick sharpening techniques.
You know, it's funny - I play games on both consoles, and almost invariably, my PC games take longer to run and play than my console games.
Now, part of this is the fact that they're just filling more RAM. But I think another part is that PC coders don't feel nearly as much pressure to make loading fast. I know the hoops I jumped through to Load Faster Dammit on the PS2 game I worked on, and just from looking at the file layout of most PC games I can tell you they're not doing the same things.
Of course, they're getting big bonuses on user-modifiability by doing that, so it's not just "pc coders dumb hurrr". But I'd bet cash that you could write a game that loaded from the CD faster than most modern PC games load from the hard drive.
(And then when the first patch comes along, you'd copy the whole shebang to the hard drive anyway - another reason PC games install to HD.:) )
"However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics."
Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?
(I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)
I worked on one game that had a lot of textures. I think it may have been something around 30gb of textures before compression, if not more. After compression I was able to cinch this down to about 7gb (blah blah "jpeg can do better" remember these had to decompress in realtime on a PS2 at very high speed. The decompression algorithm had to be about the same speed as a simple Huffman lookup. It was, and got better compression besides.)
I'm told the PS2 turned out to have curious problems with dual-layer discs, so the sequel's going back to a single-layer disc, and we're cutting a lot of the textures thanks to that.
So, no. We really can't fit all the game data in a dual-layer DVD. 8.4gb goes damn fast when you want modern graphics.
Except that it happened in New York, which means court in New York. And I live in California now, and my time is valuable. I don't want to go flying back and forth.
The first. Although she did later relent and say that I could stay if I packed up my computers, disconnected from the Internet, and cleaned up my room "to her satisfaction". (I drank beer. Some weeks, I'd even drink *two* beers. A week. And I generally waited until I had a dozen bottles sitting on my desk before putting them back in the six-pack and bringing them in for the return reward.)
I left.
I don't know what kind of legal position that would put either of us in - I mean, I didn't *have* to leave, technically.:P
I know. At that point I just wanted to get out of there, but I am planning on calling her back and saying, basically, "give me my deposit back or I'm bringing you up on charges".
I took pictures of the entire apartment before I left, so she can't claim I left it trashed. And I kept all the notes she left for me too.:)
I was going to college in Long Island. I got a letter from the RIAA claiming that I'd been sharing episodes of Sex in the City. I've got no interest in that series - I wasn't sharing those at all. They listed an IP address they claimed was mine, but I have a dynamic DNS service that logs what IP I have, and I'd never had that IP.
My landlady opened my mail because it was marked "urgent" (I was out of town for a few days to go to a programming competition), saw the legal complaint, kicked me out of the house one month before finals, and refused to give me my deposit back. This was one of the major factors that led to me dropping out of college for the second time.
(Admittedly I dropped out of college and went straight into a programming job at Google, so I'm not about to claim "this ruined my life" - if anything, it was a net win for me. But still.)
I'm not claiming that the RIAA is responsible for my landlady's actions, but they did send me offical legal papers that were not based in any way in fact. I wouldn't believe any of their lawsuits without some real concrete evidence.
I believe very few people enjoy the act of day to day driving, sports cars are a minute proportion of road traffic.
I own a 1988 Nissan Sentra 2-door. Before this car, I had a 1985 Volvo 740. Before that car, I had a 1980 Volvo 240 station wagon.
I love driving. I refuse to buy anything that isn't manual transmission. I work 20 miles from work explicitly so that I can drive back and forth each day - it's a calming and focusing experience for me.
Not all people who love driving go out and buy Generic Automatic-Transmission Sports Car #72. Some of us have different tastes.
Do I have statistics? No. But I can offer at least one counterexample to your claim, and I personally would like to see a real study on this.
In my gaming group, we've got about six DSes now - the host and I bought ours the same weekend, and within a month everyone else was sick of fighting over the limited supply for Meteos battles and just got their own.:)
Obviously if you're a 32-year-old guy who doesn't have a local video gaming group, this is going to be a bit trickier - the only place I've been to where you could be reasonably sure of finding random people with a DS or PSP was the Penny Arcade expo last weekend.
I totally agree with you on TNG, but I've always enjoyed DS9. Sure, it was more soap-opera-ish than the others, but that's what I liked about it - it actually had continuity, characters, and conflict.
"Command by committee". Truer words were never spoken. I've got to remember that one.:)
People who aren't terribly worried about things that would require instant phone access.
People who have multiple lines anyway (cellphone, anyone?)
I gotta admit, when I balance "chance of heart attack and crashed phone system" vs "money I'd save", I'll go with the phone system. My BSD router's been up for 124 days now, and the only reason it's been that short is because the power went out 124 days ago . . .
. . . and my house phone is a cordless phone with a wall plug that's needed for operation.
The only reason I haven't switched yet is because I use DSL (my ISP is awesome) but doesn't yet support DSL-with-no-phone-line.:/
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I own pavlovian.net. I don't run my own mail server, I pay a company a small amount per year to do it for me. I have everything at pavlovian dot net. If my email provider goes out of business, that's OK - I'll find another one and point pavlovian dot net to that. If my email provider starts putting up big spam filters that I don't want, or adds mandatory "features" that I don't want, or starts injecting advertisements into my e-mail, I can, again, just move it.
I own pavlovian dot net email and I can do anything I want with it.
I also run a Jabber server at pavlovian dot net. Anyone on a different jabber server can send me IMs. Again, I'm safe from companies going out of business, or being corrupted, or just deciding they don't like me anymore. I can keep this jabber server up as long as I want, and I have full control over it.
I also have an AIM name.
If AOL decides to ban me, I lose contact with many friends. If AOL goes out of business and shuts down AIM, I lose contact with many friends. I used to have to look at ads, but thanks to Trillian that's no longer the case - of course, once in a while AOL blocks Trillian in one way or another and I have to wait for Trillian to fix it.
Personally, I'd love to do all my chatting over Jabber. If it's over Jabber, I'm not relying on any company besides myself - I can always just move my server if I need to. Spam? Yeah, spam will be a problem. I personally get no IM spam, though some of my friends get quite a bit. But we've got the same problem with e-mail, and I get perhaps one spam a week past my filters. (My email provider - the one I pay for - has massive financial incentive to have good spam filters. And they do. I suspect the same thing will be true of IM if Jabber becomes universal.)
To put it simply: Relying on a single company is bad, because companies can decide to turn evil and screw people over. Relying on yourself is good. I would rather rely on myself.
Ads. I think the various financial documents show that Google has been profitable for a while. You'd be astonished at how many people will pay enormous amounts of money for advertising.
Most of the responses to this are right - the more experienced coders simply don't bother. I personally probably would still compete just to go hang out with these people, except the competitions are always local so I just drive by and bum around in the hotel with them. :)
That said, there's also a lot of practice involved with this. I'm rusty and would probably drop out very early at this point - I just don't have the time to compete regularly (or, more precisely, it's not cost-effective for me.)
As for your competition, keep in mind that there's a lot of selection bias there - you're comparing "people we've already hired that have been working here for a while successfully" with "a bunch of people who may or may not have the faintest idea what they're doing".
While there is no cause-and-effect, there does appear to be some correlation - at least, if you want your coders to do research and solve previously unsolved problems. If you just want a code monkey, a highly-ranked Topcoder competitor is probably the last one you'd want to hire - he'd get bored and rewrite your database for fun.
:) )
('Course, it'd end up twice as fast and able to speak perfect English, but we'll ignore that for now.
It's worth pointing out that a significant number of the best US competitive programmers already work at Google. Myself included, along with many of my co-workers.
:)
You see less of a US force at the Google Code Jam simply because Google's already hired them.
Good thing it's impossible to place a bomb in a car, creating some kind of "car bomb". An invention like that would make all the expensive military preparation completely useless.
Personally, I think this thing should definitely be built, and if it's knocked down by terrorists (unlikely, but getting likelier IMHO), we should just build another. But, honestly . . . AA and jets ain't necessarily gonna help.
That's because every hearing aid on the planet is designed to be unobtrusive, but when you notice it, it just looks like a lump of pink plastic.
Make it look *cool* and that would all change. Current hearing aids just don't look cool.
maybe cheap year-long (unlimited) subscriptions to networks of sites?
:)
http://www.graphicsmash.com/
http://www.girlamatic.com/
http://www.moderntales.com/
Seems to be working for them.
(I'm subscribed to the first and the third at the moment.)
Sure, but even the military at least allocates their gobs of money sensibly. It's not like they spend ten billion on learning new pointy stick sharpening techniques.
You know, it's funny - I play games on both consoles, and almost invariably, my PC games take longer to run and play than my console games.
:) )
Now, part of this is the fact that they're just filling more RAM. But I think another part is that PC coders don't feel nearly as much pressure to make loading fast. I know the hoops I jumped through to Load Faster Dammit on the PS2 game I worked on, and just from looking at the file layout of most PC games I can tell you they're not doing the same things.
Of course, they're getting big bonuses on user-modifiability by doing that, so it's not just "pc coders dumb hurrr". But I'd bet cash that you could write a game that loaded from the CD faster than most modern PC games load from the hard drive.
(And then when the first patch comes along, you'd copy the whole shebang to the hard drive anyway - another reason PC games install to HD.
"However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics."
Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?
(I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)
Everquest: Champions of Norrath.
In our case, it was mostly static lighting. I haven't had a chance to try God of War yet either, and I don't know where their gigabytes went.
No. We really can't.
I worked on one game that had a lot of textures. I think it may have been something around 30gb of textures before compression, if not more. After compression I was able to cinch this down to about 7gb (blah blah "jpeg can do better" remember these had to decompress in realtime on a PS2 at very high speed. The decompression algorithm had to be about the same speed as a simple Huffman lookup. It was, and got better compression besides.)
I'm told the PS2 turned out to have curious problems with dual-layer discs, so the sequel's going back to a single-layer disc, and we're cutting a lot of the textures thanks to that.
So, no. We really can't fit all the game data in a dual-layer DVD. 8.4gb goes damn fast when you want modern graphics.
USB = University of Stony Brook? If so, yep. If not, huh? :)
Except that it happened in New York, which means court in New York. And I live in California now, and my time is valuable. I don't want to go flying back and forth.
I could provide pictures of the apartment and photocopies of her notes to me.
:P
I'm not going to, because I don't particularly want to make the effort. But I could.
The first. Although she did later relent and say that I could stay if I packed up my computers, disconnected from the Internet, and cleaned up my room "to her satisfaction". (I drank beer. Some weeks, I'd even drink *two* beers. A week. And I generally waited until I had a dozen bottles sitting on my desk before putting them back in the six-pack and bringing them in for the return reward.)
:P
I left.
I don't know what kind of legal position that would put either of us in - I mean, I didn't *have* to leave, technically.
Because I got brainwaves crossed and said "RIAA" when I meant "MPAA".
Call me crazy, but I haven't heard any comments about either one being significantly more careful than the other.
I know. At that point I just wanted to get out of there, but I am planning on calling her back and saying, basically, "give me my deposit back or I'm bringing you up on charges".
:)
I took pictures of the entire apartment before I left, so she can't claim I left it trashed. And I kept all the notes she left for me too.
No. Not in the least.
I was going to college in Long Island. I got a letter from the RIAA claiming that I'd been sharing episodes of Sex in the City. I've got no interest in that series - I wasn't sharing those at all. They listed an IP address they claimed was mine, but I have a dynamic DNS service that logs what IP I have, and I'd never had that IP.
My landlady opened my mail because it was marked "urgent" (I was out of town for a few days to go to a programming competition), saw the legal complaint, kicked me out of the house one month before finals, and refused to give me my deposit back. This was one of the major factors that led to me dropping out of college for the second time.
(Admittedly I dropped out of college and went straight into a programming job at Google, so I'm not about to claim "this ruined my life" - if anything, it was a net win for me. But still.)
I'm not claiming that the RIAA is responsible for my landlady's actions, but they did send me offical legal papers that were not based in any way in fact. I wouldn't believe any of their lawsuits without some real concrete evidence.
I believe very few people enjoy the act of day to day driving, sports cars are a minute proportion of road traffic.
I own a 1988 Nissan Sentra 2-door. Before this car, I had a 1985 Volvo 740. Before that car, I had a 1980 Volvo 240 station wagon.
I love driving. I refuse to buy anything that isn't manual transmission. I work 20 miles from work explicitly so that I can drive back and forth each day - it's a calming and focusing experience for me.
Not all people who love driving go out and buy Generic Automatic-Transmission Sports Car #72. Some of us have different tastes.
Do I have statistics? No. But I can offer at least one counterexample to your claim, and I personally would like to see a real study on this.
It depends on your social circle.
:)
In my gaming group, we've got about six DSes now - the host and I bought ours the same weekend, and within a month everyone else was sick of fighting over the limited supply for Meteos battles and just got their own.
Obviously if you're a 32-year-old guy who doesn't have a local video gaming group, this is going to be a bit trickier - the only place I've been to where you could be reasonably sure of finding random people with a DS or PSP was the Penny Arcade expo last weekend.
I totally agree with you on TNG, but I've always enjoyed DS9. Sure, it was more soap-opera-ish than the others, but that's what I liked about it - it actually had continuity, characters, and conflict.
:)
"Command by committee". Truer words were never spoken. I've got to remember that one.
People who aren't terribly worried about things that would require instant phone access.
:/
People who have multiple lines anyway (cellphone, anyone?)
I gotta admit, when I balance "chance of heart attack and crashed phone system" vs "money I'd save", I'll go with the phone system. My BSD router's been up for 124 days now, and the only reason it's been that short is because the power went out 124 days ago . . .
. . . and my house phone is a cordless phone with a wall plug that's needed for operation.
The only reason I haven't switched yet is because I use DSL (my ISP is awesome) but doesn't yet support DSL-with-no-phone-line.
Why not just hack your emule client and disable uploading?
Just curious.
Seems a bit simpler and more reliable, that's all I'm saying.
If you want upload credits you could even find something to allow you to enable uploading for specific files.