I personally know (mostly the hard way:P) that saying "It's all cross-platform! We promise!" doesn't always mean it *is* cross-platform.
However, a few months ago I moved an (admittedly small) webapp from Windows apache to Linux apache, and the only change I needed to make was switching all my include backslashes to frontslashes. Which I should have done to start with, since frontslashes work on Windows.
So that cross-platformability seems pretty reliable.:)
I've always wondered. Wouldn't word get around? I mean, it's nice to be able to say "we'll write your program in half the time and a quarter of the money as your competitors", but when it's two years past the due date and you've blown past your budget far enough to fund a small country, I'd think the guy who hired you wouldn't be happy.
And so presumably you could start accumulating data on this - "Company X charges 73% of the national average and exceeds their budget by 593% on average" - and it'd make it pretty obvious which companies were worth buying from and which weren't, which sorta blows the whole vaporware dealie out of the water.
I used to buy computer parts from a company called Minotaur. They were the best - cheap, fast, incredible customer service. I think I personally bought four or five entire computers from them, and gave them enough recommendations for two dozen more. I was working at a games company that needed half a dozen more computers, so I suggested them and they arrived working in great shape in about a week.
A month later we needed half a dozen more, so they bought from Minotaur. Turned out Minotaur had just been sold to someone else - two computers arrived in two weeks working, two more arrived not-working, and two never showed up (I think they were considering taking Minotaur to court last I heard.)
Since then I've bought another three computers, and given recommendations for half a dozen more . . . all from Newegg. Was Minotaur's lousy service really worth losing the dozens of sales they would have gotten?
Of course it's helping! I haven't been killed by terrorists, and I know dozens of people who also haven't been!
It's not just because of the PATRIOT act, though. It's also because of this terrorist repellant that I'm selling. It might look like a rock, but I guarantee it's real terrorist repellant.
What do you mean, does it work? Of course it works! Do *you* see any terrorists around?
The wind-turbine people said "oh, it couldn't possibly make any difference." Now - surprise - there's some evidence wind power screws with wind patterns.
The tidal-power people are saying "it couldn't possibly make any difference" and give figures like "the entire planet's energy needs could be filled twice over by the ocean's tides". Except that actually getting that much energy out of the ocean would involve, oh, stopping the tides, and I don't think anyone's claimed that won't cause serious problems.
So this generator produces 10MW, does it? Where's the power coming from? Answer: it's slowing down the river. Will this cause future problems? I have absolutely no idea, but it's something that would be nice to find out.
Whenever someone comes up with a source of untapped power, think for a second and figure out where the energy is actually coming from.
One of the big disadvantages to the whole blacklist/whitelist things is, indeed, inconvenience. But you seem to be thinking it's just a minor inconvenience where, to a lot of people, it's major.
Example: A while ago (I don't know if they still do, but it wouldn't surprise me) Unreal registered unreal:// to open games. You didn't have to do anything, it just worked. A lot of sites relied on this (click hyperlink, open unreal, badabing badaboom).
Now, if the web browser used a whitelist, there's a few options. First off, it could be utterly impossible for Unreal to register even with user assistance - bzzt, this is bad. Remember, users want things to be easy.
Second, it could require the user to go through the steps to add unreal:// to their settings. Also bad, because the Unreal coders don't want to have to change their installer every time the interface changes. Plus it's irritating for users. Bzzt.
Third, it could ask the browser/OS to register itself, and the browser/OS could pop up a confirmation box. But we already know users can be duped into clicking just about anything ("You MUST click Yes for real 100% hardcore xxx porn!") and so this wouldn't exactly be a rock-hard barrier. Bzzt.
Fourth, it can do what it does now, which is also flawed. Bzzt.
I personally think solution 3 is the best one - but if Windows doesn't already have hooks for things like this, it might not be practical for Mozilla to add a happy little dialog. There might be a way to query the system about what it *would* do it if we happened to pass it an unreal:// url, then prompt the user to see if that's what they really want to happen, but I bet that's exploitable also ("What's this rundll thing? Oh, the line says 'free porn'! I'll click yes")
I'd agree that more security = better (and more convenience = better too - the trick lies in balancing the two), but just saying "we should use a whitelist" leaves so much undecided that it's almost useless.
Personally, I'll be a bit irritated if whatever they use internally doesn't support IMAP:P But I haven't used gmail yet, so maybe I'll like that better.
Probably. If you remember the Google Code Jam, I was #1 in the world before the finals (and bombed in the finals, so it goes.) There wasn't any pressure about "you should work for us", but it was quite clear that if anyone was *interested* in working for them, it was a definite possibility.
AFAIK only two people were interested - me being one of them - and we both now have jobs at Google, although I don't start for another week and a half.
Wait, cancel that. I can't redistribute the source, the license says so. I presume this means I can't send the patch file either. (Unless you're the writer and forgot to sign in.)
Maybe I should write my own open-source task manager - there's very little that Tasks supports that I need.
Hrm. I don't actually remember in detail, it was a while ago. I think I ended up searching the source for some critical string (maybe the "complete" flag in the database?) assuming it wouldn't be referenced often, then just dug through it one item at a time until I found the right one.
I'd be willing to send the source I have, but it's not Tasks 1.8.6, it's Tasks 1.8.1, that being what was the current version when I did it. The recent version upgrades haven't seemed major enough to install and figure out my modifications again.
Also, I ended up making a few changes to the Tasks code - I'd have to port them over (and this is what makes taking advantage of your free trial difficult - I'd be looking at source-hacking for an hour or so just to make it do what I want, unless you've added it as an option.) (If you're curious, I entirely disabled the "percentage complete" system, as well as eliminating the code that marks projects as complete once all their subprojects are complete. The way I use it, those features are actually counterproductive.)
I suppose if you've got that problem solved, I'll give it a try, assuming there's some way to port over my old Tasks data. I don't relish retyping 232 open tasks in.:P
I use the Tasks Basic Personal edition (i.e. free version). I can access it from anywhere via HTTP and it's got nested tasks, which I find important.
The only problem I've been having is that if you have a *lot* of tasks in one group with a lot of notes, it can take four or five seconds to open the group - I presume it's just making a ton of giant database queries, but it's irritating.
I wrote a polyreducer for a game I worked on. It would take as input a mesh, bone data, and an input texture map, crunch over them for a few minutes, and spit out a mesh with fewer triangles (and a new texture map). It would have been easy to make it spit out a bump map as well, except we were targeting PS2 and a bump map would have taken another rendering pass.
Quite effective. We stripped about 25% of the triangles out of most models. I kinda wish I'd gotten time to apply it to the world geometry too - especially if I could have snuck it in before the lighting step. That might have been tricky though.
One amusing side effect is that I end up looking at people's examples of their algorithms (like, say, ZBrush) and just laughing. They're not doing *any* of the hard parts - they're getting as input the target mesh, they're guaranteed the high-detail mesh is a subdivided version of the target mesh, what are they doing to earn their $500? Mine would take the high-detail mesh only and do *everything* from there!
Maybe I should talk to my old boss and see if he'll let me reimplement the algorithm and sell it as a plugin . . .
I disagree. I built a polyreducer for a game company and I can say first-hand that, despite the fact that we had models built by hand, despite the fact that we had really skilled artists, despite the fact that they *knew* triangles were at a premium, the polyreducer I constructed was able to get rid of an easy 10% of the triangles before visual quality decreased noticably. 20%-30% if the camera was far away (which it was through most of our game, so we polyreduced our models a lot:) )
I don't know how many triangles the models in movies have, but I find it hard to believe that all of them are 100% necessary - like with large programming projects, the focus tends to move more towards "don't worry about making it as efficient as possible, just make it look good/feel good/work". A well-designed polyreducer could probably do quite a number on those.
I always thought I was smart. I was never sure *how* smart. I mean, I found all school absurdly easy. And yet I got bad grades. So was I smart, and just unmotivated? Because I felt motivated, I was just so unbelievably *bored* that I never got around to doing anything.
I sort of dropped out of high school (it was an alternative high school, and I was in an alternative program within the alternative high school - I didn't go to school but wasn't called in for truancy) and played video games and worked on programming. Eventually I realized, hey, I'm not going anywhere. I should go to college.
I pulled together enough of a final year of high school (13th grade - alternative high school, remember?) and managed to get into Oberlin College, which is a pretty good liberal arts school and totally didn't fit me.
Luckily, partway through Oberlin, I found Topcoder. Suddenly I had a way to measure my skills against others, and I had something I could get better at!
As I said, I got lucky - it turned out I actually *was* smart. If you go to the site now, that's me ranked #4 in the world out of thousands (and #1 in America - Snap's Canadian, tomek's Polish, and John's Austrailian. reid is American also, so I should probably start practicing again).
However, I wasn't *that* smart. I failed my first round pretty horribly - but I looked at it, said "I can do better", and did better. I don't believe I know everything - I don't. I'm not even close. I do believe that if I don't know it, I can learn it faster than just about anyone, even if I have to invent it first. That's where my strength is, but it only comes into play if I admit I don't know something.
If you don't believe you can get any better, you never will.
Anyway. I dropped out of college for a variety of reasons (emotional problems and a serious school mismatch) and went to work for a games company, Snowblind Studios (I got the job through Topcoder, note.) I spent a year and a half on Champions of Norrath and then went back to college, at Stony Brook this time. That lasted about six months - I was an order of magnitude more bored than I was at Oberlin, I'd learned so much at Snowblind - and so I decided I was done with college. About a year before that I'd done very well in the Google Code Jam, being #1 globally before the final round (don't ask how I did in the final round), and Google said they were interested in hiring me. While I was at Stony Brook we worked out the details and, long story short, I've got a job at Google as soon as I get an apartment in the Bay Area. I'm starting in about a month.
I plan to save my money, quit in a few years, and start a game studio. We'll see how well that works.
As I said though, I got lucky. Not everyone can expect to be ranked #1 in the US - there's maybe half a dozen people who battle it out for that spot on Topcoder, with reid and I being the most consistent winners. And I wasn't expecting to get that high - when I started, I was thinking "wow, if I'm lucky, I could even be in the top hundred!"
Kinda ironic, honestly.
But here's the thing. I don't do well because I'm smart. I *am* smart, no argument, but it's not everything. I do well because I decided I wanted to win, and I asked questions about things I didn't understand, I devoured textbooks to learn the things I couldn't ask about, and every time I screwed up I went over it dozens of times trying to figure out how I could do better next time. That score you see there isn't just the result of good genetics - it's also the result of a hell of a lot of hard work and brainsweat.
So I guess that's the best advice I can give. Okay. So you're a genius. Great, you've got an advantage. Now get out there and make it work for you. Maybe that won't be going through college - if you don't, you're going to have
Not a problem they're running into. I just got a job at Google, and I don't have a PhD (or a bachelor's for that matter. Or a high school diploma for that matter . . . my education hasn't really been standard.)
And before I get cute comments:P no, I'm not a janitor, I'm a coder, and I'm working on some major project of theirs - I'm not 100% sure which one, but from what they've told me I'm going to be working on Puffin.
So I know, first-hand, that they're not about to insist on university degrees for everyone - they don't even insist on university degrees for their engineers.:)
I would say the fact that it's accessible from anywhere. More than once I've been away from my computer and wishing I could access the emails on it remotely - finally I wised up and set up an SSH tunnel so I could VNC or RDP in, but right now it's actually in a box being shipped across the country and it's got some files I wish I could get to. Sucks to be me.
I got a VPS a while back - it's only 4gb, but I still put important stuff on there and it's been ultrahandy once in a while. I'm paying $20/mo for it, and it's worth a hell of a lot more than $4 to me, despite the fact that my home system is almost 400gb.
I had the same problem - I left my college, then moved several times, changing ISPs each time. Eventually I got sick of changing my email address. I bought a domain name ($15/yr) and got a paid email server that I could point my domain at ($20/yr).
For $35/yr I have top-quality email access, and if my server starts doing things I don't approve of, I just point my domain somewhere else and pay them instead. I could even host my own email if I felt like it - I have a VPS - but I'd rather not deal with the hassle.
So assuming - and this is a big assumption - assuming this is the only way to do so, how do we go about it?
We can't just magically start charging for emails. We'll need some system of billing. Presumably the sender will be required to pay, not the receiver. So we'll need for every single server on the 'net to agree to this.
Which brings up a serious questions:
How do we police it? What happens when a server sets up for spammers that doesn't actually charge?
We could say that the sending server has to pay the receiving server. Now, how do we deal with disputes? How do we deal with back doors? Are we really going to ask non-techs to be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in spam if they open another Elf Bowling game?
Where does the money go? Does the ISP eat it? Does the governemnt? (Whose government?) Does it go to the person receiving the mail?
Will I have to pay money to mailing list providers to get on the list? Even if that money is deposited right back in my account?
Saying "charge for email" is all very nice, but it's extremely difficult.
Still broken logic . . . as far as we know, humans have half a dozen methods for recognizing faces, all of which work flawlessly - and when someone has "face blindness", the problem isn't in the recognizing, it's in the chunk of the brain that processes and deals with that information.
Of course we don't really have any way of knowing.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I personally know (mostly the hard way :P) that saying "It's all cross-platform! We promise!" doesn't always mean it *is* cross-platform.
:)
However, a few months ago I moved an (admittedly small) webapp from Windows apache to Linux apache, and the only change I needed to make was switching all my include backslashes to frontslashes. Which I should have done to start with, since frontslashes work on Windows.
So that cross-platformability seems pretty reliable.
I've always wondered. Wouldn't word get around? I mean, it's nice to be able to say "we'll write your program in half the time and a quarter of the money as your competitors", but when it's two years past the due date and you've blown past your budget far enough to fund a small country, I'd think the guy who hired you wouldn't be happy.
And so presumably you could start accumulating data on this - "Company X charges 73% of the national average and exceeds their budget by 593% on average" - and it'd make it pretty obvious which companies were worth buying from and which weren't, which sorta blows the whole vaporware dealie out of the water.
I used to buy computer parts from a company called Minotaur. They were the best - cheap, fast, incredible customer service. I think I personally bought four or five entire computers from them, and gave them enough recommendations for two dozen more. I was working at a games company that needed half a dozen more computers, so I suggested them and they arrived working in great shape in about a week.
A month later we needed half a dozen more, so they bought from Minotaur. Turned out Minotaur had just been sold to someone else - two computers arrived in two weeks working, two more arrived not-working, and two never showed up (I think they were considering taking Minotaur to court last I heard.)
Since then I've bought another three computers, and given recommendations for half a dozen more . . . all from Newegg. Was Minotaur's lousy service really worth losing the dozens of sales they would have gotten?
I wonder.
Of course it's helping! I haven't been killed by terrorists, and I know dozens of people who also haven't been!
It's not just because of the PATRIOT act, though. It's also because of this terrorist repellant that I'm selling. It might look like a rock, but I guarantee it's real terrorist repellant.
What do you mean, does it work? Of course it works! Do *you* see any terrorists around?
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Also known as conservation of energy.
The wind-turbine people said "oh, it couldn't possibly make any difference." Now - surprise - there's some evidence wind power screws with wind patterns.
The tidal-power people are saying "it couldn't possibly make any difference" and give figures like "the entire planet's energy needs could be filled twice over by the ocean's tides". Except that actually getting that much energy out of the ocean would involve, oh, stopping the tides, and I don't think anyone's claimed that won't cause serious problems.
So this generator produces 10MW, does it? Where's the power coming from? Answer: it's slowing down the river. Will this cause future problems? I have absolutely no idea, but it's something that would be nice to find out.
Whenever someone comes up with a source of untapped power, think for a second and figure out where the energy is actually coming from.
"Boss, we've found a guy who's able to build a cruise missile out of parts he found in his backyard. What'll we do?"
"Tricky one. I say we throw him out of his house and force him into bankruptcy."
"But won't that just leave him willing to take a job from anyone, even our enemies?"
"BANKRUPTCY!"
"But wouldn't it be better if *we* hired -"
"BANKRUPTCY!"
"But how do we know he won't get hired by, say, Iraq -"
"BANKRUPTCY!"
"Okay, okay, bankruptcy it is."
"Glad you see it my way! You'll go far in this government."
"There's also this story about a little girl and her kitten -"
"BANKRUPTCY!"
----
With intelligence agencies like these, who needs enemies?
Eww.
One of the big disadvantages to the whole blacklist/whitelist things is, indeed, inconvenience. But you seem to be thinking it's just a minor inconvenience where, to a lot of people, it's major.
Example: A while ago (I don't know if they still do, but it wouldn't surprise me) Unreal registered unreal:// to open games. You didn't have to do anything, it just worked. A lot of sites relied on this (click hyperlink, open unreal, badabing badaboom).
Now, if the web browser used a whitelist, there's a few options. First off, it could be utterly impossible for Unreal to register even with user assistance - bzzt, this is bad. Remember, users want things to be easy.
Second, it could require the user to go through the steps to add unreal:// to their settings. Also bad, because the Unreal coders don't want to have to change their installer every time the interface changes. Plus it's irritating for users. Bzzt.
Third, it could ask the browser/OS to register itself, and the browser/OS could pop up a confirmation box. But we already know users can be duped into clicking just about anything ("You MUST click Yes for real 100% hardcore xxx porn!") and so this wouldn't exactly be a rock-hard barrier. Bzzt.
Fourth, it can do what it does now, which is also flawed. Bzzt.
I personally think solution 3 is the best one - but if Windows doesn't already have hooks for things like this, it might not be practical for Mozilla to add a happy little dialog. There might be a way to query the system about what it *would* do it if we happened to pass it an unreal:// url, then prompt the user to see if that's what they really want to happen, but I bet that's exploitable also ("What's this rundll thing? Oh, the line says 'free porn'! I'll click yes")
I'd agree that more security = better (and more convenience = better too - the trick lies in balancing the two), but just saying "we should use a whitelist" leaves so much undecided that it's almost useless.
That's exactly what I was going to say, only you put it better than I would have. ;)
Yeah, I think you're right about this. Just saying "they're great UNIX/AIX people" doesn't imply, in any way, that they're the top tier of everyone.
Personally, I'll be a bit irritated if whatever they use internally doesn't support IMAP :P But I haven't used gmail yet, so maybe I'll like that better.
Curiously, it doesn't seem to work that way. Once you get past a certain level, geeks end up fitting in without any problems.
For some reason, the cliche comic-book-store hygiene-less tech is never actually all that skilled - second- or third-tier at best.
Probably. If you remember the Google Code Jam, I was #1 in the world before the finals (and bombed in the finals, so it goes.) There wasn't any pressure about "you should work for us", but it was quite clear that if anyone was *interested* in working for them, it was a definite possibility.
AFAIK only two people were interested - me being one of them - and we both now have jobs at Google, although I don't start for another week and a half.
I'd be surprised if this wasn't a similar deal.
Wait, cancel that. I can't redistribute the source, the license says so. I presume this means I can't send the patch file either. (Unless you're the writer and forgot to sign in.)
Maybe I should write my own open-source task manager - there's very little that Tasks supports that I need.
Hrm. I don't actually remember in detail, it was a while ago. I think I ended up searching the source for some critical string (maybe the "complete" flag in the database?) assuming it wouldn't be referenced often, then just dug through it one item at a time until I found the right one.
I'd be willing to send the source I have, but it's not Tasks 1.8.6, it's Tasks 1.8.1, that being what was the current version when I did it. The recent version upgrades haven't seemed major enough to install and figure out my modifications again.
See gmail.
:)
No, I don't *know* that that's what they're doing . . . but it wouldn't surprise me
But from the screenshot I saw, it didn't look like they had priorities (although I could be wrong since that's a grand total of one screenshot.)
Unfortunately, Tasks 2.0 costs money :P
:P
Also, I ended up making a few changes to the Tasks code - I'd have to port them over (and this is what makes taking advantage of your free trial difficult - I'd be looking at source-hacking for an hour or so just to make it do what I want, unless you've added it as an option.) (If you're curious, I entirely disabled the "percentage complete" system, as well as eliminating the code that marks projects as complete once all their subprojects are complete. The way I use it, those features are actually counterproductive.)
I suppose if you've got that problem solved, I'll give it a try, assuming there's some way to port over my old Tasks data. I don't relish retyping 232 open tasks in.
I use the Tasks Basic Personal edition (i.e. free version). I can access it from anywhere via HTTP and it's got nested tasks, which I find important.
The only problem I've been having is that if you have a *lot* of tasks in one group with a lot of notes, it can take four or five seconds to open the group - I presume it's just making a ton of giant database queries, but it's irritating.
Quick two questions:
:P
Where'd you get the touchscreen?
What kind of power conditioning are you using?
I've been (slowly) building one of these one my own, but those are two problems I haven't managed to solve to my satisfaction yet
In production code, for that matter.
I wrote a polyreducer for a game I worked on. It would take as input a mesh, bone data, and an input texture map, crunch over them for a few minutes, and spit out a mesh with fewer triangles (and a new texture map). It would have been easy to make it spit out a bump map as well, except we were targeting PS2 and a bump map would have taken another rendering pass.
Quite effective. We stripped about 25% of the triangles out of most models. I kinda wish I'd gotten time to apply it to the world geometry too - especially if I could have snuck it in before the lighting step. That might have been tricky though.
One amusing side effect is that I end up looking at people's examples of their algorithms (like, say, ZBrush) and just laughing. They're not doing *any* of the hard parts - they're getting as input the target mesh, they're guaranteed the high-detail mesh is a subdivided version of the target mesh, what are they doing to earn their $500? Mine would take the high-detail mesh only and do *everything* from there!
Maybe I should talk to my old boss and see if he'll let me reimplement the algorithm and sell it as a plugin . . .
I disagree. I built a polyreducer for a game company and I can say first-hand that, despite the fact that we had models built by hand, despite the fact that we had really skilled artists, despite the fact that they *knew* triangles were at a premium, the polyreducer I constructed was able to get rid of an easy 10% of the triangles before visual quality decreased noticably. 20%-30% if the camera was far away (which it was through most of our game, so we polyreduced our models a lot :) )
I don't know how many triangles the models in movies have, but I find it hard to believe that all of them are 100% necessary - like with large programming projects, the focus tends to move more towards "don't worry about making it as efficient as possible, just make it look good/feel good/work". A well-designed polyreducer could probably do quite a number on those.
I always thought I was smart. I was never sure *how* smart. I mean, I found all school absurdly easy. And yet I got bad grades. So was I smart, and just unmotivated? Because I felt motivated, I was just so unbelievably *bored* that I never got around to doing anything.
I sort of dropped out of high school (it was an alternative high school, and I was in an alternative program within the alternative high school - I didn't go to school but wasn't called in for truancy) and played video games and worked on programming. Eventually I realized, hey, I'm not going anywhere. I should go to college.
I pulled together enough of a final year of high school (13th grade - alternative high school, remember?) and managed to get into Oberlin College, which is a pretty good liberal arts school and totally didn't fit me.
Luckily, partway through Oberlin, I found Topcoder. Suddenly I had a way to measure my skills against others, and I had something I could get better at!
As I said, I got lucky - it turned out I actually *was* smart. If you go to the site now, that's me ranked #4 in the world out of thousands (and #1 in America - Snap's Canadian, tomek's Polish, and John's Austrailian. reid is American also, so I should probably start practicing again).
However, I wasn't *that* smart. I failed my first round pretty horribly - but I looked at it, said "I can do better", and did better. I don't believe I know everything - I don't. I'm not even close. I do believe that if I don't know it, I can learn it faster than just about anyone, even if I have to invent it first. That's where my strength is, but it only comes into play if I admit I don't know something.
If you don't believe you can get any better, you never will.
Anyway. I dropped out of college for a variety of reasons (emotional problems and a serious school mismatch) and went to work for a games company, Snowblind Studios (I got the job through Topcoder, note.) I spent a year and a half on Champions of Norrath and then went back to college, at Stony Brook this time. That lasted about six months - I was an order of magnitude more bored than I was at Oberlin, I'd learned so much at Snowblind - and so I decided I was done with college. About a year before that I'd done very well in the Google Code Jam, being #1 globally before the final round (don't ask how I did in the final round), and Google said they were interested in hiring me. While I was at Stony Brook we worked out the details and, long story short, I've got a job at Google as soon as I get an apartment in the Bay Area. I'm starting in about a month.
I plan to save my money, quit in a few years, and start a game studio. We'll see how well that works.
As I said though, I got lucky. Not everyone can expect to be ranked #1 in the US - there's maybe half a dozen people who battle it out for that spot on Topcoder, with reid and I being the most consistent winners. And I wasn't expecting to get that high - when I started, I was thinking "wow, if I'm lucky, I could even be in the top hundred!"
Kinda ironic, honestly.
But here's the thing. I don't do well because I'm smart. I *am* smart, no argument, but it's not everything. I do well because I decided I wanted to win, and I asked questions about things I didn't understand, I devoured textbooks to learn the things I couldn't ask about, and every time I screwed up I went over it dozens of times trying to figure out how I could do better next time. That score you see there isn't just the result of good genetics - it's also the result of a hell of a lot of hard work and brainsweat.
So I guess that's the best advice I can give. Okay. So you're a genius. Great, you've got an advantage. Now get out there and make it work for you. Maybe that won't be going through college - if you don't, you're going to have
Not a problem they're running into. I just got a job at Google, and I don't have a PhD (or a bachelor's for that matter. Or a high school diploma for that matter . . . my education hasn't really been standard.)
:P no, I'm not a janitor, I'm a coder, and I'm working on some major project of theirs - I'm not 100% sure which one, but from what they've told me I'm going to be working on Puffin.
:)
And before I get cute comments
So I know, first-hand, that they're not about to insist on university degrees for everyone - they don't even insist on university degrees for their engineers.
I would say the fact that it's accessible from anywhere. More than once I've been away from my computer and wishing I could access the emails on it remotely - finally I wised up and set up an SSH tunnel so I could VNC or RDP in, but right now it's actually in a box being shipped across the country and it's got some files I wish I could get to. Sucks to be me.
I got a VPS a while back - it's only 4gb, but I still put important stuff on there and it's been ultrahandy once in a while. I'm paying $20/mo for it, and it's worth a hell of a lot more than $4 to me, despite the fact that my home system is almost 400gb.
I had the same problem - I left my college, then moved several times, changing ISPs each time. Eventually I got sick of changing my email address. I bought a domain name ($15/yr) and got a paid email server that I could point my domain at ($20/yr).
For $35/yr I have top-quality email access, and if my server starts doing things I don't approve of, I just point my domain somewhere else and pay them instead. I could even host my own email if I felt like it - I have a VPS - but I'd rather not deal with the hassle.
So assuming - and this is a big assumption - assuming this is the only way to do so, how do we go about it?
We can't just magically start charging for emails. We'll need some system of billing. Presumably the sender will be required to pay, not the receiver. So we'll need for every single server on the 'net to agree to this.
Which brings up a serious questions:
How do we police it? What happens when a server sets up for spammers that doesn't actually charge?
We could say that the sending server has to pay the receiving server. Now, how do we deal with disputes? How do we deal with back doors? Are we really going to ask non-techs to be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in spam if they open another Elf Bowling game?
Where does the money go? Does the ISP eat it? Does the governemnt? (Whose government?) Does it go to the person receiving the mail?
Will I have to pay money to mailing list providers to get on the list? Even if that money is deposited right back in my account?
Saying "charge for email" is all very nice, but it's extremely difficult.
Still broken logic . . . as far as we know, humans have half a dozen methods for recognizing faces, all of which work flawlessly - and when someone has "face blindness", the problem isn't in the recognizing, it's in the chunk of the brain that processes and deals with that information.
:)
Of course we don't really have any way of knowing.