amishforkfight

This is essentially what 'swatting' is.

I don't believe there is anything 'weird' about the tie-breaker, it's a pretty standard technique - local elections, tournament tie-breaking, movie night voting. What's weird about using second and third choices to determine the best when there's a tie for the first choice?

What I think is really weird is why would a system put much weight, if any at all, on someone's 4+ choice? We might be coming up with a result that received the most points, but are we actually coming up with a result that the most people will be happy with, or is it the least boring thing that people will put up with?

I don't do a lot of this kind of work, but as an interested party with sunday spare time, I think the problem here is that you're scoring anything other than the first picks.

If you just look at first picks, Newbie HBase wins 3 to 1. If for some reason Newbie HBase was in a 2/2 split with Mapreduce and KIR (flip James's top 2 votes), you then take into account 2nd rankings, which in this case means Newbie HBase wins again.

I don't believe you ever want to take into account someone's griefer vote, too much potential to game the system with no benefit to the group as a whole.

Thanks for the repost, I haven't read this before and found it quite good.

She's a Star Trek character that died a few times.

I thought the abuse was part of the story. The lengths we will go to preserve ourselves, even to destroying the weakest of us in the effort. The subsequent Ender novels delve into Ender coming to grips with how he was used and what he did.

Granted it's been forever since I read them.

The idea of a basic level of income isn't that it goes away once I find a job that pays the same or more, it's that I'm always guaranteed that base pay. If I take a job that pays an additional 2800 per month, then I'm grossing 5600/mo.

I don't think there's any reason to believe that low paying jobs will just go away, and more reason to think that the people who want nothing more than those low paying jobs will take them.

As someone whose employer just underwent Chapter 11 and a subsequent sale, I hope that the power-jousting, cockfights, backstabbing, and general dumbassery that I experienced will not happen to the members of THQ. The lengths some people will go through for some token of power...

In most RTS games, an arbitrary Resource Mine generates resource X at a fixed rate, but the resource is delivered into your resource pool in fixed-rate chunks. 100 units of X per minute, delivered at the top of the minute (for example). You can't purchase Unit Y until you have all 300 units of Resource X, so you wait 3 minutes.

TA employed a continuous economy system where you were more concerned with your resource Bandwidth rather than total quantity available. Energy or Metal mines added +X of their respective resource to your pool, but it was continuous and if your pool was full, excess resources just vanished.

The unique aspect to this system was that the player could begin constructing any building whether or not he had the resources available to finish it. The player didn't need 300 units of Resources X to start constructing Unit Y -- he just started building it. The construction units would open up and start taking in Resources at their fixed rate. If the resource pool ran out of resources, aka your construction needs outstripped your gathering capabilities, all construction slowed to the maximum rate at which you were able to gather resources.

A liquid economy, still one of the most fun I've ever played.

Confirmed -- I've used WebStorm and it's derivative PHPStorm for several years, they are excellent IDEs.

Another blog that talks about an ambiguously-named product and provides no links to or descriptions of said product. I had no idea what Cheddar was after a couple minutes of skimming the blog posts.

I'd imagine the allure of getting in early, perhaps?

Who would get offended by that? It's not even close to offensive.

PNG8 (which IE6 supports) has had support for alpha transparency for a long time, but only Fireworks was able to create those files. I'm guessing that these guys are making PNG8s? I haven't tested the site myself.

I'd like to see the prosecutors of these cases jailed for the equivalent time lost by by those wrongfully imprisoned. "Sovereign immunity?" Sorry, I guess you should do your job then. If you find out later that you did your job so wrong that someone loses 10 years of their life, you sure as shit better be the first one in line unlocking their cell.

Public officials have great power, and there needs to be an equally great responsibility and consequence for abusing that power. And yes, being ignorant or making the wrong decision counts as abuse of power.

The simplest solution is that each member of the household customize the seat to their liking before performing any actions. If you fall in and flush your intestines out, well, tough giggles.

Big buckets of data my ass. My 2gb cap is pathetic, and I've only got 3g.

I need to learn from this. I'm usually too excited to start turning out some code, and I almost always end up at a dead end a few weeks later (talking about personal side projects).

Same here. I'll buy two or three <$3 apps and not think about it. >$6 and I start thinking about my budget, and slow down. Same issue with Steam sales. The advantage of the AppStore is the payment integration and instant install, it works really well for the impulse, "I need a nifty new tool" type of personality.

Just a guess, but the inclusion of -ms prefixes indicate the use of a CSS preprocessor and some off-the-shelf mixin libraries for all the fancy crap.

> The more the iPhone succeeds, the less leverage the carriers have, Mr. Kuittinen explained. All they have is bandwidth.

I look forward to the day when mobile carriers are nothing but dumb pipes. Maybe then they'll focus on providing the most bandwidth and best coverage, instead of crap apps that no one cares about.

I'd spend $600 on a new phone if my monthly bill was going to be $30.

The three laptops I had before my MBP were all from different companies, ASUS, Gateway, Dell, and I hated the hardware on all of them. There was always something going on. The case didn't close right, the battery life sucked, the trackpads were awful and so itty bitty, the wifi cut in and out, the power cord needed to be jiggled just right to charge, or wouldn't charge at all unless held in place with tape just so... between the three laptops and six years there was always SOMETHING going wrong. So you could say that I originally purchased my MBP because of the hardware. I expected to install Windows on it (didn't, but that's a different story).

I swallowed the extra cost when I did the math. I use my laptop about 3000 hours a year. Day in, day out, I'm on it in some way. They usually last me 2 years or so before I get the itch to upgrade or they fail. I did the math and found that the ~$1000 laptops I bought cost me $0.003 per minute over the course of those two years. A $1300 MBP cost me $0.004 per minute. I decided that I would rather pay $0.001 more per minute to enjoy the hardware I used. I'd rather be in a rage over the fact that my code isn't doing what I want than if my battery isn't taking a charge again.

An added side benefit has been how much tougher the MBP is. I've had it for two years now and it shows no signs of needing replacement. I probably won't upgrade until I see how Apple's Retina display transitions to their laptop line. The upgrade then will probably be out of lust than necessity.

We're talking about the primary tool of our trade. I make my living using this device. If I was repairing cars again I'd be buying Snap-On. Yeah, it's expensive. But goddamnit if I break a wrench they replace it for free. The guy drives to my house and gives me demos. I don't need my tools giving me grief, I need to get work done with them.

Just my thoughts on the 'Apple tax'.

That's a really good point that I've begun realizing more frequently in my work. People are blown away by most things, and there is almost no correlation between how difficult the problem was and how amazed they are. In fact, I frequently find that the easy stuff tends to impress more (simple UI tweaks, small jQuery animation).

I try to get my highly technical kudos from my technical friends, because my non-technical co-workers begin to glaze over when when I really want to talk about something tricky and fun I did.

Why do the technical people always seem to get the short end of the stick? I have people approaching me on a monthly basis with their 'great idea' and 'all I need is someone to code it', and compensation varies from 'money when it gets big' all the way up to a very enticing 20% equity. After working on a few of these I now ask for cash up front, no equity. I have plenty of my own ideas and not enough time to work on them, tvym.

What problems does it not solve that the unframework concept is supposed to solve? I'm a but curious on what I'm missing out on, as I continuously feel like it meets or exceeds all of my needs.

> Thats idea is lovely and all but Flourish never made it out of BETA after years of development.

I'm happy to see Flourish getting some notice, even though there doesn't seem to be a lot of love for it with the small mention. I'm happy Flourish user for well over a year now, and I feel as if Flourish's BETA tag is akin to Google's BETA tag. I honestly haven't run across a single issue with the library that would discourage me from using it in a production environment.

It's an unframework, it doesn't force MVC, but you know what? I don't need MVC for 90% of what I do. What I need to do is validate form input, accept a few file uploads, log that to a DB, kick off a few internal emails, and provide user feedback.

I think that some day I'll dig into Code Igniter, but as the only web developer/designer in the marketing department for a small company a tool that lets me stay agile and do less than conventional setups, as well as easily integrate into existing environments has been a godsend for me. It smooths out a lot of PHP's weird quirks, comes pre-baked with an amazing focus on security (oh thank god for your passion for security, @wbond), and in general just helps me get my job done.

Oh, and when people ask me what framework I use, I say "Flourish, it's like jQuery for PHP".

/fanboy

edit: One downside to Flourish is that I'm almost useless without it. What do I use to sanitize a POST variable again? How do I unescape before output? I've gotten so used to the Flourish classes I spend more time on Google than coding when I don't have access to it.

I've been a full blown PHPStorm evangelist for quite some time now, really nice IDE with great text editing capabilities.

So I'm a 4.5, that's nice to know.

The micro instance seems to be routinely throttled, for random reasons. My vm was choked for days despite only pulling in ~200 visitors per day. Upgrading to the Small instance has removed all throttling.

I'm running a standard LAMP stack on it, nothing crazy.