I was in college and off my mom's medical insurance. I had acne that was gradually getting under control, but I'd run out of acne medicine. Going to a doctor would be crazily expensive, but just buying another 100-pack of my medicine online was a (relatively) mere $70 online.
So I went online and bought medicine.
Maybe I was financing a spammer, but you know, a large amount of the medical profession at this point is just a giant con game.
Eh? How does this work? Porn site displays image, user types in false result, porn site dispatches back to the site giving the captcha, captcha site says "no", porn site says "no".
I'm a Google employee, and I have a public blog. I don't advertise it as "the blog of a Google employee", and I'm not dumb enough to talk about confidential stuff on it.
I suspect that we just don't feel it's worth spewing information on how to use Google. I read two MS blogs - one of them talks about how to program Windows, one of them talks about Windows history. Google doesn't really need either of those.
Of course I could be wrong on all of this, I'm not in PR, but there's certainly nothing you sign that says "you must not under any circumstances make a public blog".
A small number are obviously worth keeping when you're having them.
Another amount are worthwhile to keep, but you won't realize it until afterwards. For example, a good deep discussion with someone who ends up being your girlfriend.
38M is less than 4 cents of disk space. Call me crazy, but I suspect he's got 4 cents of value stuffed in there somewhere - and just how compressible do you think this data is?
My system is slowly getting loaded with more and more open-source software (and I've got Cygwin), but until there's a really good emulation layer for running Windows games on Linux (Cedega is not yet good enough) I'm still using Windows as my base.
My chat computer might get converted over to Linux sometime, but I'm actually more worried about doing that because it's an essential computer, and if I can't get it to do what I need, I'm kind of screwed.
(Keep in mind that I'm a professional gamer - I don't *currently* work in games, but that's mostly because I'm working at a much better-paying job to save up enough to start my own game studio.)
I dropped out of college after a year and a half. I'd been competing on an online programming site named Topcoder - a games company was searching for people through that same site, and I was in the top ten, and I managed to get the job. I worked there for about a year and a half, released a game, and went back to college.
That lasted precisely one semester. I still haven't seen my report card, I suspect I failed everything, and I don't care - I'm done with school.
I went off to work at a non-games company, and while it's awesome, and pays far far better than any game company, I'm mostly here for two reasons:
* Learn things I wouldn't be able to learn at a games company * Make a lot of money so I can start my own games company * Have free time without nasty intellectual property issues so I can work on my first commercial game at home.
In maybe two years I'm quitting and trying to start my own company. Hard? Yes. Insane? Definitely. Worth it, for most people? No way. Worth it for me?
Hell fucking yes.
Ask me again in three years if you want to see if I pulled it off.
That's true. LJ is a very CPU-heavy site (surprisingly), and therefore anything that can spare CPU is welcomed. A site that mostly transmitted static pages would probably find gzipping to be an obvious win.
As I remember, www.livejournal.com has experimented with gzip compression several times. They've discovered that the price of the CPU far exceeds the price of the bandwidth.
Pfft. GTA isn't even remotely as objectionable as it could be. Take a look at Postal sometime - that was a game designed solely to be as objectionable as possible.
Guess what? It sucked. Terrible game. Didn't sell.
GTA's actually fun. You get to drive around real fast and blow shit up. I still don't know how to get a prostitute (after almost finishing Vice City - I just keep forgetting to go look it up) but I don't care, you know?
Driving around real fast and blowing shit up. That's pretty much what I want out of that game. The rest, I can take it or leave it.
"- come back when you're hacking the video timing to change screen mode part way down a scan to get colour/resolution combinations that are "impossible" on the platform. That's the sort of game writing on small platforms that earns respect."
You mean like you do regularly on the GBA?:P
In any case, I'm not going for your sympathy or respect here. I'm just making a point about languages. Sheesh. Stop waving your digital dick around.
I program console games. We've got very strict RAM limits - from 384kb on the GBA to 64mb on the amazingly spacious XBox. (With some curious design decisions that can make it feel smaller than the 32+4mb PS2, but I digress.)
On systems like this you've got to track pretty much every byte. One meg of garbage collector overhead means one meg you don't have available for useful stuff. I generally don't use standard dynamic allocation - at all - it's just too expensive. Maybe one big pool to load files into on the PS2 that can be cleared entirely between levels. Nothing like that on the GBA of course.
As far as I can see, there's three languages that provide this necessary feature - ASM, C, and C++. So I use C++.
I'd love to see an "improved" C++. But it seems like every time someone decides to improve C++, the first thing they do is tack on a garbage collector and get rid of direct memory access. And, you know, those are features I desperately need. Frequently those unwanted features are the only way I can even display graphics.
And yes, it's possible to write modern games in languages with garbage collectors (as I understand it, the entire Jak and Daxter series was written in Lisp) but I know what lengths I go to to squeeze performance out of these systems - I really don't need a garbage-collected albatross hanging off my shoulder.
And before anyone says "garbage collectors are faster than deallocating things manually!" - if I don't *allocate* anything, what makes you think I need *deallocation*? There is no heap. Move on.
I have a virtual private server. It's awesome. $20/month, and it's up 24/7 on a fucking amazing connection (I've clocked 6megabyte/second downstream), and I've got 30gb of bandwidth per month. I tend to use maybe 100mb.
I have three other friends with VPSes. One of them has multiple special-purpose VPSes.
I don't know anyone with a real dedicated non-virtual server.
I don't know the details, but I can guarantee it will involve a hard-nosed ex-cop, a beautiful reporter, a spunky sidekick of some kind, and a last-minute saving of the world thanks to some contrived quality of humanity, like, for example, love.
We'd better throw a dog in there too. Everyone likes dogs.
Only definitions of "democracy" that the government disagrees with.
As long as "democracy" means "we give you people to vote on, you choose which one you prefer, and then they lead you without you being allowed to complain", they're all for it.
I use a DSL service that I love. They give me 1.5mbit/384kbit. Maybe it's not blazing speed, but it's fast enough. Ping times are low. The great things: I can run servers on my system. I get a static IP. And I get amazing support.
Exhibit A: I called them up because an installation had gone wrong and I couldn't get online. Wanted to know whose fault it was. Turned out I hadn't released the DHCP properly, and it was waiting to time out, so they reset it on their end - and then I realized I hadn't written down any mirrors for my BSD distribution I was trying to get working, and didn't have any other working computers. So they tracked down a BSD distribution site for me and gave me the URL.
Exhibit B: They have semi-supported IPv6 tunnels (in that the service is available, but is not *officially* supported - unofficially, it is supported.)
Exhibit C: They have a server-side firewall to block incoming ports that tend to be problematical. It's configurable by the end-user. Yes, I have some control over *their firewall* on their end. (One of the options is "off entirely", for the curious.)
How much of that would be preserved with Verizon? Fuck all.
(Addendum: While digging through the config to see what the exact state of IPv6 was, I just realized I can change my reverse DNS entry for my static IP. Through the web interface. With full official support. I love these guys.)
I was making a medium-length drive through an area that I knew was kind of confusing a while back. I opened up Google Maps's satellite view to give me some landmarks.
"Okay, turn left on this street, then I'll drive between a bunch of warehouses, then right here, it looks like two major streets later, and - holy crap, what's with that intersection? I guess I take two rights and a left. I should end up on the right of this gigantic parking lot. Okay."
During the drive, I thought I was lost several times, but, hey! Warehouses! And here's the next major street!
And then at that painful intersection, I just looked for the parking lot and ended up on the right of it. (Yes, it really was as bad as I'd thought.)
I'd be willing to swap disks too, although I suspect I'm on the wrong side of the continent.
This is what bugs me - there are tons of people out there who'd do it for free. Where does this $250k come from? We just want to get the information out there and safe, we can worry about finding someone to interpret it later!
Slashdot Mirror
I vaguely remember that it was antibiotics. It did require a prescription (the standard acne medicine, irritatingly, just made it worse.)
"Hi! I'd like to buy a new computer! What can you recommend?"
"Well, right over here we've got a state-of-the-art Sony Vaio."
"Vae . . . via . . . veiaou?"
"Vaio."
"Viiu?"
"Vaio."
"Um. Well, one of my friends has a media center, and I was thinking of getting one of those too. What can you recommend?"
"Here's a Viiv!"
"Veev? Viv?"
"Viiv."
"You know what? I don't appreciate being made fun of."
"Wait! Don't go! I'm serious!"
I bought a prescription online once.
I was in college and off my mom's medical insurance. I had acne that was gradually getting under control, but I'd run out of acne medicine. Going to a doctor would be crazily expensive, but just buying another 100-pack of my medicine online was a (relatively) mere $70 online.
So I went online and bought medicine.
Maybe I was financing a spammer, but you know, a large amount of the medical profession at this point is just a giant con game.
Scam or con? I'll go with the cheaper one.
Eh? How does this work? Porn site displays image, user types in false result, porn site dispatches back to the site giving the captcha, captcha site says "no", porn site says "no".
Not really much harder to program.
I'm a Google employee, and I have a public blog. I don't advertise it as "the blog of a Google employee", and I'm not dumb enough to talk about confidential stuff on it.
I suspect that we just don't feel it's worth spewing information on how to use Google. I read two MS blogs - one of them talks about how to program Windows, one of them talks about Windows history. Google doesn't really need either of those.
Of course I could be wrong on all of this, I'm not in PR, but there's certainly nothing you sign that says "you must not under any circumstances make a public blog".
You're right. Most aren't.
A small number are obviously worth keeping when you're having them.
Another amount are worthwhile to keep, but you won't realize it until afterwards. For example, a good deep discussion with someone who ends up being your girlfriend.
38M is less than 4 cents of disk space. Call me crazy, but I suspect he's got 4 cents of value stuffed in there somewhere - and just how compressible do you think this data is?
Games, still.
My system is slowly getting loaded with more and more open-source software (and I've got Cygwin), but until there's a really good emulation layer for running Windows games on Linux (Cedega is not yet good enough) I'm still using Windows as my base.
My chat computer might get converted over to Linux sometime, but I'm actually more worried about doing that because it's an essential computer, and if I can't get it to do what I need, I'm kind of screwed.
(Keep in mind that I'm a professional gamer - I don't *currently* work in games, but that's mostly because I'm working at a much better-paying job to save up enough to start my own game studio.)
I dropped out of college after a year and a half. I'd been competing on an online programming site named Topcoder - a games company was searching for people through that same site, and I was in the top ten, and I managed to get the job. I worked there for about a year and a half, released a game, and went back to college.
That lasted precisely one semester. I still haven't seen my report card, I suspect I failed everything, and I don't care - I'm done with school.
I went off to work at a non-games company, and while it's awesome, and pays far far better than any game company, I'm mostly here for two reasons:
* Learn things I wouldn't be able to learn at a games company
* Make a lot of money so I can start my own games company
* Have free time without nasty intellectual property issues so I can work on my first commercial game at home.
In maybe two years I'm quitting and trying to start my own company. Hard? Yes. Insane? Definitely. Worth it, for most people? No way. Worth it for me?
Hell fucking yes.
Ask me again in three years if you want to see if I pulled it off.
Here come the patent lawyers!
Doing laser surgery . . .
. . . OVER THE INTERNET
That's true. LJ is a very CPU-heavy site (surprisingly), and therefore anything that can spare CPU is welcomed. A site that mostly transmitted static pages would probably find gzipping to be an obvious win.
As I remember, www.livejournal.com has experimented with gzip compression several times. They've discovered that the price of the CPU far exceeds the price of the bandwidth.
Bandwidth is cheap. Computers, not so much.
Pfft. GTA isn't even remotely as objectionable as it could be. Take a look at Postal sometime - that was a game designed solely to be as objectionable as possible.
Guess what? It sucked. Terrible game. Didn't sell.
GTA's actually fun. You get to drive around real fast and blow shit up. I still don't know how to get a prostitute (after almost finishing Vice City - I just keep forgetting to go look it up) but I don't care, you know?
Driving around real fast and blowing shit up. That's pretty much what I want out of that game. The rest, I can take it or leave it.
"- come back when you're hacking the video timing to change screen mode part way down a scan to get colour/resolution combinations that are "impossible" on the platform. That's the sort of game writing on small platforms that earns respect."
:P
You mean like you do regularly on the GBA?
In any case, I'm not going for your sympathy or respect here. I'm just making a point about languages. Sheesh. Stop waving your digital dick around.
I'm not honestly sure. To be honest, besides a bit of legacy cruft, there's nothing I find problematical.
Of course, that's not to say there aren't things that could be improved. I'm just not aware of what they are.
nobody seems to be interested in developing.
I program console games. We've got very strict RAM limits - from 384kb on the GBA to 64mb on the amazingly spacious XBox. (With some curious design decisions that can make it feel smaller than the 32+4mb PS2, but I digress.)
On systems like this you've got to track pretty much every byte. One meg of garbage collector overhead means one meg you don't have available for useful stuff. I generally don't use standard dynamic allocation - at all - it's just too expensive. Maybe one big pool to load files into on the PS2 that can be cleared entirely between levels. Nothing like that on the GBA of course.
As far as I can see, there's three languages that provide this necessary feature - ASM, C, and C++. So I use C++.
I'd love to see an "improved" C++. But it seems like every time someone decides to improve C++, the first thing they do is tack on a garbage collector and get rid of direct memory access. And, you know, those are features I desperately need. Frequently those unwanted features are the only way I can even display graphics.
And yes, it's possible to write modern games in languages with garbage collectors (as I understand it, the entire Jak and Daxter series was written in Lisp) but I know what lengths I go to to squeeze performance out of these systems - I really don't need a garbage-collected albatross hanging off my shoulder.
And before anyone says "garbage collectors are faster than deallocating things manually!" - if I don't *allocate* anything, what makes you think I need *deallocation*? There is no heap. Move on.
I personally use http://www.rimuhosting.com/ - they've worked quite well for me. Good prices, good servers. :)
"Pretty soon"?
:)
I have a virtual private server. It's awesome. $20/month, and it's up 24/7 on a fucking amazing connection (I've clocked 6megabyte/second downstream), and I've got 30gb of bandwidth per month. I tend to use maybe 100mb.
I have three other friends with VPSes. One of them has multiple special-purpose VPSes.
I don't know anyone with a real dedicated non-virtual server.
Your "pretty soon" is now
I don't know the details, but I can guarantee it will involve a hard-nosed ex-cop, a beautiful reporter, a spunky sidekick of some kind, and a last-minute saving of the world thanks to some contrived quality of humanity, like, for example, love.
We'd better throw a dog in there too. Everyone likes dogs.
Democracy won't ever be filtered.
Only definitions of "democracy" that the government disagrees with.
As long as "democracy" means "we give you people to vote on, you choose which one you prefer, and then they lead you without you being allowed to complain", they're all for it.
no, they dont. :(
I use a DSL service that I love. They give me 1.5mbit/384kbit. Maybe it's not blazing speed, but it's fast enough. Ping times are low. The great things: I can run servers on my system. I get a static IP. And I get amazing support.
Exhibit A: I called them up because an installation had gone wrong and I couldn't get online. Wanted to know whose fault it was. Turned out I hadn't released the DHCP properly, and it was waiting to time out, so they reset it on their end - and then I realized I hadn't written down any mirrors for my BSD distribution I was trying to get working, and didn't have any other working computers. So they tracked down a BSD distribution site for me and gave me the URL.
Exhibit B: They have semi-supported IPv6 tunnels (in that the service is available, but is not *officially* supported - unofficially, it is supported.)
Exhibit C: They have a server-side firewall to block incoming ports that tend to be problematical. It's configurable by the end-user. Yes, I have some control over *their firewall* on their end. (One of the options is "off entirely", for the curious.)
How much of that would be preserved with Verizon? Fuck all.
(Addendum: While digging through the config to see what the exact state of IPv6 was, I just realized I can change my reverse DNS entry for my static IP. Through the web interface. With full official support. I love these guys.)
(sonic.net, for the curious.)
You got Cisco on my human rights!
He's using an old motor AS A MOTOR. My mind is blown. I didn't think such a thing was possible.
Give this man a prize!
I was making a medium-length drive through an area that I knew was kind of confusing a while back. I opened up Google Maps's satellite view to give me some landmarks.
"Okay, turn left on this street, then I'll drive between a bunch of warehouses, then right here, it looks like two major streets later, and - holy crap, what's with that intersection? I guess I take two rights and a left. I should end up on the right of this gigantic parking lot. Okay."
During the drive, I thought I was lost several times, but, hey! Warehouses! And here's the next major street!
And then at that painful intersection, I just looked for the parking lot and ended up on the right of it. (Yes, it really was as bad as I'd thought.)
That's why it's useful.
I'd be willing to swap disks too, although I suspect I'm on the wrong side of the continent.
This is what bugs me - there are tons of people out there who'd do it for free. Where does this $250k come from? We just want to get the information out there and safe, we can worry about finding someone to interpret it later!