GrandMasterBirt

I will answer this with an anecdote:

My friend bought a building. 50 apartments. He got investment money from family to put a down payment on the loan. Fix it up. Have tenents pay rent and cover the loans while looking for a seller. Sell it for a proffit.

This was great. Except that he had ABSOLUTELY no risk-mitigation. He could not afford to keep the house on the market for 3 yrs to ensure that no matter what, he does not lose all the invested money.

Guess what? Problems arose trying to sell the house. Took 3 months longer than expected (9mo total vs expected 6). Money ran out. Boom foreclosure. Lost 800k.

The lesson I learned is that take what you are assuming will happen, and make at least SOME risk mitigation. How can you get out? If you can't what will you lose? Etc. Don't make long term risky goals based on hopes that everything will be alright. Assume the worst, can we still come out even if that happens?

Look. iPhone is superior to Android. I know it every day I use an Android. However I cannot buy an iPhone because:

a) I use sprint and am happy with it.

b) I don't support Apple's control on a moral level. So I will not support Apple by buying the iPhone.

c) I won't develop for iPhone except as an after-thought or short-term project. This way I make money, and get out. I won't make any long-term plans for it. In fact that is true of EVERY mobile platform. Never bind a single long-term plan with one platform. Tomorrow Android can fail and WebOS rises to beat everyone in one swoop. You can't build a company on hopes and luck alone.

No, my direct suggestion is the following:

a) A game has no issues. It's life cycle is short.

a.a) A long-term product/service strategy can't rely on one platform as they are under the whim of the owner.

b) Don't build exclusively for one platform. Thats right, develop for android, webos, etc. The point is that one choice is to be fucked in the ass by a company at their discretization, the other choice is to have protection vs that.

You can't complain "waa waa waa apple chaned their rules" too bad. It's apple's proprietary tightly controlled market. You want to make money? Bend over backwards for them. Otherwise piss off. It happened to twitter clients, its happening to facebook clients, its happening to apple clients. Learn from history.

Windows applications have been lucky. MS has been pretty nice over the years with what they allow. However if MS says "30% surcharge on any application selling something running on windows" then guess what, same cries will happen. Boo freakety hoo. This is what people were saying about being careful with apple's tight control. This is why I support android. But some didn't listen so they get fucked in the end.

BOO FREAKETY HOO. They put all their eggs in apple's basket. Sorry dudes, bad strategy.

Is it wrong for our government to do any security research? I mean can good things not come out of it? Be thankful it was reported.

Often when pairing we'd commit with messages like "WIP: 1" "WIP: 2" etc. push pull switch machines (remote pairing) get checkpoints in there. Then before pushing to the main branch we'd roll all that up into one commit with a very helpful message. Boom solves a great workflow problem.

Git gives you granular control of every aspect of itself. When you REALLY need it, it works out. Insane history rewrites make the full team have to propperly sync. Rebase is an amazing tool for getting your repo up-to-date and not making someone else when looking through history have to worry about mix-matching commits to see exactly how one branch turned out. Its personal prefernece. In the end of the day, git will not let you cover your tracks.

Anecdote:

I fucked up some commits. I put in wrong conmiter names and so on, omitted some data in some of my commits. With git I could clone my repo, experiment with rewriting commits to fix conmiter names, and then merge it to everything. Yes history is changed, but end of the day this is not about hiding shit. This is about keeping the repo information useful and simple. If you want to blame shit on people, there are external systems which will ensure that people will get blamed for their own shit. VCS is not for that, VCS is to version your code, be able to un-fuck yourself up, and figure out why someone did something and how they did it exactly at some point in time. Nowhere in the is "blame people for mistakes" seen.

I've seen people not want to get blamed or use VCS. They used a word document to version their source. Yes. And I assure you it took people lots of time to realize wtf is going on.

If anything the lastpass breach gave me MORE confidence in lastpass. For all we know there was no breach. HOWEVER lastpass immedicately communicated to everyone and discovered an issue in a very paranoid way. I think this is security I wish every site had. However I kid myself thinking that is possible, I rather that a single-point-of-failure is lastpass vs a crappy website that exposes a password which compromises tons of accounts and having to change all of them even if I was notified.

Furthermore lastpass supports youbi key so it supports two-factor auth.

Thats cheaper than my 10mbit connection + phone + basic cable in new york.

Consider this question: Let us say the cost of an infrastructure at google HQ is X. X is the cost regardless of internet. Now let us say you have Y which is the price of an average inernet connection for google offices. Or you pay 4 * Y to get that connection. Ok lets make it 10 * Y. Whatever. The point is that if it makes your workers a bit more productive (5000 people?) lets say 3%. I think that 3% productivity on developers translates to WAY above the price of that connection.

Internet at work: 100mbps download speeds when downloading ubuntu.

Its the nature of the game. My company and google both need high speed internet and they will pay for it.

Heres my input on these sort of questions:

To determine what language to use, ask yourself the following question:

a) How many devs will or you want to support your application.

b) Approximately (ballpark) how many users will be sending simultaneous requests? If there are going to be 20 people logged in total, performance is not an issue.

c) How much time you have.

d) How much hardware will you be using?

e) Do you realize that doing queries from a table of 10 or 1000000 records are equivalent to the application if you return 2 rows to it? The work is in the database and will remain unchanged.

Now, many places chose RoR/PHP (and some good frameworks) as a front-end, while using a "fast" language like java or erlang for the back-end. Facebook is one such example. They use erlang to handle comet requests and php to render the front end, and I think java to do back-end messaging and so on. The front-end code just queries it.

If its a simple data application (show page, get input, query/update db, show page) then RoR is easy to make/maintain. If there are 10,000 users logged in at once, I'd think about this further. If you are a sole maintainer, RoR is nice since it makes writing and maintaining simple granted you know what you are doing.

Question: Why is the power cord so important? Can one not be made with cheap materials? I was waiting for a punch line but it didn't come.

Of the people I know:

my wife - tech unsavvy, afraid of the dvd player - has no use for chrome os. Not enough features for her everyday use. Cannot play 99% of any flash content she constantly uses. Cannot play netflix.

my daughter - 4 years old - has no use for chrome os. Does not play any game she plays. What it plays has atrocious performance.

my grandparents (mother's side) - knows as much about computers as I do about brain surgery, we both know it exists - has no use for chrome os. It does not do 90% of what he does online which is watch videos and not on youtube. They are windows format which can be played on any device other than chrome os.

my one tech unsavy friend - uses facebook and word processing. perfect for her as she has no idea how to save files, google docs is a good solution. Needs to be able to print.

every other friend - same category as wife. Note: I have only 1 tech savy friend.

one friend's father - uses youtube and checks finance news online. The perfect candidate.

So basically from every single person I know, only 2 maybe 3 people qualify as the perfect chrome os users.

However, this reminds me of that movie about making a $100 computer. And they had the exact same concept. No hard drives, store everything on the internet.

If chrome os is a 150 dollar unlabeled computer and we get more useful applications and good performance there, it will change the face of computing. The problem is that its more likely the iPad will do that, not the chrome os, just needs a price reduction.

I am right now unable to have lunch with co-workers. I've always done the group lunch and would always make every possible effort to get as many people involved as possible.

The problem is that at some point, I simply run out of people :( I am not that much of a social person who comes up to random people and socializes with them very well, so its really hard for me now, I'm not getting my daily dose of talking to people, its maddening.

Talking about work or not is irrelevant. What is important is that the conversation is completely friendly, enjoyable by all, not stressful, and does not in any way require immediate action. Also it means that at any point we can go off on a completely different direction talking one moment about building software and the next about how cats decide that your keyboard is a backscratcher.

To be honest, the lack of socializing is demoralizing and depressing :(

I have to say, I once came fairly close to bricking my router. However after I realized the router was complete and utter garbage I put the brick to it, so now it is officially bricked, office space style.

While I agree, the thing that jQuery does, and this was outlined a long while ago in a presentation is that different browsers have different behaviors sometimes for some of the most simple things. Querying is one of those, and the list goes on. Sometimes there are just browser bugs! Frameworks like jq and others ensure a consistent behavior between different browsers.

Also note, native browser calls will always be faster. JQ gives you some major power though. It is always best to optimize the big parts of your performance with jq and other frameworks getting the logic correct, then these micro optimizations can be made, including this iterator and your this.checked. However for a general use case, this iterator is exactly what people need as it solves the 70% case.

I must disagree. Managing 2500 people is a daunting task. I've seen problems that arise out of managing 30 young people playing a game. It is an extremely difficult task and most can't tackle it in the smallest of scales.

Writing this will involve mentioning what you ran, how many people, how long it was ran, turnover rate of members, conflict resolutions, etc. During the interview I would point out examples of large-scale conflicts which could have potentially threatened having lost large numbers of people and how you resolved those.

Also important is time spent in that position, what you did to make the job scalable, etc. These problems are absolutely real-world problems.

I must mention this: Focus on problems solved. You can say online community, but saying that it is a game with people dedicating good amounts of time to it is useful since it shows that this is not a facebook community where moding one can be a fairly simple task most can do.

Wait, "Password" was stolen? WTF they store unencrypted passwords?!?!?!!?! I sure hope they meant password hashes otherwise upset many people should be.

The problem is audience:

Kids don't give a shit. Privacy is crap, they got their penis pictures on facebook. They want their fucking video games.

People playing games all day don't give a shit. They want their fucking games, stfu privacy and get moar kof33 and fucking get this shit online.

People with money to lose care. They care that their information is stolen because that could lead to their money being stolen.

People who know the value of information care. Thats few people though, since facebook exists.

In the end of the day people are willing to talk shit, when it comes to action that is a different story. How many people were so against EA's rootkits, but how many actually boycotted? Same with Apple? And now its same with Sony. Nobody will do anything. Nobody will boycott, the company will just shrug this off as an "opse".

Think about that for a minute. They made a really good operating system which I would use if I could. However not many could afford it. Usually its... buy 2x computers, or one Apple. Thus only the few "elites" have it (or those willing to sacrifice to get it)

> In India

Wait, what about in the united states? Sure colleges may have great professors, but what about our lower education which people go through for 80% of their life's education, for many its 100%. Those people are underpaid, and have no incentives to be good, only to get good test pass rates from students on mandatory tests.

I went though highschool getting high 90s in English, and at start of college realized my writing is absolutely atrocious. It took one brilliant seasoned professor drilling us in thinking "right" when it comes to writing to break us out of our old shitty habits. The same happened in math, and I had a professor who just made math enjoyable and applicable to life. Compared to highschool and before... I just knew it, I was good at understanding it, so I just aced it all, it was just numbers and information. There was no interest sparked until college.

Now I am looking for schools for my daughter. And honestly I am looking for those that pay teachers well and have no long-term contracts. That means one thing: perform well or die. Its like programming, if you only hire programmers for prices nobody wants to work at, you will get the bottom of the barrel who could not succeed, so why think they will make your company succeed?

I never used WON. The thing is I like Stardock's Impulse. All the benefits none of the crap.

The problem with impulse is that steam has the nice steam APIs for matchmaking and such that require steam. Can't use it if you sell on another store. Its the vendor-lock-in. I bought a game only later to realize I can't play with anyone I know (steam vs impulse online) and thus... well... can't win vs that.

Thunderbird? Seriously dude thats back in '99.

I have yet to meet ONE person who outside of the office uses outlook/tb/anything who is also not a hacker. (iPhone/Android/etc does not count, and even on those they use the gmail app). Sure some use hotmail, some gmail, some migrating to gmail but overall gmail does a good job with this stuff.

The real advantage of facebook is that instead of YOU filling in personal info about your friends, your friends do that for you. And vuala, instant address book management.

Just a quick thing to point out. The rabbit is out of the hat (or whatever is the correct proverb for it). As with all technologies seen in years past, don't fight it on "legal" terms, and I don't mean legal as in suing the crap out of them (the Sony method), I also mean pleading to the community (the Valve method).

In reality if Dropship is illegally accessing a person's private files without "sharing" or making it public, fix that. The approach is quite novel in that you can create a one-off dropbox account, make it private, and claim someone "hacked" into your account to acquire it as it would appear Dropship's methods cannot be proven different than a hacking attempt, which means the uploader is not "responsible".

However to counter people's points, dropbox has no choice but to demand that any copyright violation even in private files is forbidden, otherwise they are hit with DMCA, the US laws give them zero wiggle room here.

Dropship is a nifty loophole in the DMCA rules allowing dropbox to become the legal rapidshare in the US, probably involuntarily and taking on legal risk they don't want in any way.

I still am hating on steam for:

a) steam startup is the biggest contributor to starting up any game I got on steam.

b) attempting to sell a steam account results in a ban. Well actually why the hell can't one sell their steam account in the first place.

Benefits:

No CDs. Yay.

Instant buying.

Sales.

Cloud Sync so I can uninstall games to conserve space until I want to play them again.

Does not inject rootkits for DRM. (EA games still do, but thats ok I pirate those)

Haha! Xbox wins. Well... kind of. I still won't buy one or pay for online... but well... no. I just use ps3 as a glorified netflix player. HA!

The difference is that if a ps3 gets hacked, the hack can prevent you from removing it thus causing the need for new hardware. Opse.

a) what stick said. Not such a critical system.

b) Good to know from responses that amazon's paid support is crap. They'll officially tell you "were on it".

c) People are bashing this person for relying on amazon not failing all at once. I would be surprised if they hosted on amazon relying on each individual node being up 99.98% of the time. That is crazy. You build on cloud computing knowing that each one node can fail at any moment, but you build it to fall over to another node. From experience, sometimes nodes just... die... or get really unstable.

d) People bashing the dude vs offering future advice. I'm sure if his company is in deep shit, he's well aware of it.

10fps? wow it ran super smooth on FF4... awwww...