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Comment Cost of living adjustment? (Score 1) 391

by Hilltopperpete (#34615702) Attached to: Is Going To an Elite College Worth the Cost?
If this study isn't adjusted for cost of living, it's completely worthless. Almost all of the elite colleges are on the coasts, where the cost of living is SIGNIFICANTLY higher. Almost all of the large public universities are in mid-America and the South (Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, A&M, Georgia, Florida...), where the cost of living is very low. If you're not making 40% more in Boston than you would if you lived in San Antonio, you wouldn't even be able to pay your bills.

Comment Re:It's a Free Market (Score 0, Troll) 553

by Hilltopperpete (#30494140) Attached to: Microsoft Seeks Patent On Shaming Fat Gamers

I can just imagine the slogan: "Escape your depressing real life into a matching world!"

Logging on...

"Our records show that you are an overweight high-school educated 36-year old mail in Akron, Ohio with below-average IQ, part-time employment at a Wal-Mart with an annual take-home of $16k who is a single Baptist Republican."

Creating avatar... done.

"Congratulations! Explore our virtual world with your new avatar -- an overweight, high-school educated 36-year old male with below-average IQ."

Your avatar will spawn in: Virtual Akron Ohio You start with the following items: Bible, Pat Robertson DVD, "Going Rogue" by Sarah Palin You start with: 0 gold You earn: 7 gold per hour For doing the following task: Checking groceries at the Virtual Akron Wal-Mart.

Oh please... overweight, below average IQ, republican, and Christian? That's your stereotype? Here's a mold-breaker for you. I'm 24, married (going on three years, woot!), 6'3", 225 lbs of solid muscle, a software entrepreneur, and I have an IQ of 175. Jesus is my homeboy.

Comment Re:Of course they *should*... (Score 4, Interesting) 312

by Hilltopperpete (#28169893) Attached to: Should Enterprise IT Give Back To Open Source?
A Raleigh, NC-based firm, Relevance, Inc. (who I am using for my entrepreneurial venture), has "Open Source Fridays" where all of their employees take the day to work on open source. It makes for much better employees, as they often end up using the very patches they help write, and they can best utilize the nuances of languages they put careful study into. Justin Gehtland is CEO-- he wrote "Pragmatic Ajax", "Rails of Java Developers", the Ajax section of "ADWR", and won a Jolt Award for coauthoring "Better, Faster, Lighter Java". Relevance has a number of employees who collaborate on major pragmatic books or even conceive and execute themselves, like Stuart Halloway's "Programming Clojure". The benefit of working hard in open source is that your employees become incredible programmers. Here's some books by people on staff: http://thinkrelevance.com/books Here's a link to their work on open source: http://thinkrelevance.com/open-source

Comment Re:Advertiser-paid services aren't going away. (Score 1) 290

by Hilltopperpete (#27581903) Attached to: Google Losing Up To $1.65M a Day On YouTube

Time is on Google's side. Look ten years down the road. Hosting costs and bandwidth costs will be greatly reduced, as is the trend. (Think how far web technology has come since 1999.) Advertising models will have matured, and YouTube will have profitable deals with specific content providers.

The most important thing to have is users. People use Google for searches because it is familiar and it is a habit. The same is now true for videos and YouTube. Despite the fact that other video sites exist, most people think of YouTube by default. Google is willing to lose money now in order to encourage this habit, so that when it does become profitable they will be in prime position.

Finally-- somebody mentions Moore's "Law"... YouTube's growth is close to a point where it's linear, whereas bandwith costs, speed, and power will decrease exponentially.

Comment Vote Me!!! (Score 1) 586

by Hilltopperpete (#27581487) Attached to: What Do You Call People Who "Do HTML"?
I vote we call them "Choppers"... they chop up the .psd files and put them back together to make a site... plus that's a really cool job title. "Choppers" are becoming more rare, and I bet more high schoolers would learn HTML and CSS if they could be called "Choppers" and not designers (which isn't even what they do). Speaking of which... every CS major should have a semester of CSS and a semester of HTML. Unless you're doing game design, learning C or C++ is kind of useless-- especially in web programming. "Choppers" are so in demand because so many programmers have no clue when it comes to the look and feel of a site.

Comment Re:Companies that pay for OS Dev. (Score 1) 367

by Hilltopperpete (#26325247) Attached to: Stallman On the State of Free Software 25 Years On
http://thinkrelevance.com/open-source Open Source Fridays: Everyone on the Relevance technical team spends Fridays working on open source software that is contributed back to the community. Relevance founded and leads the Streamlined Framework project. Our Refactotum series shows developers how to contribute to open source. Relevance team members are founders or committers on the following projects: BrainBuster Logic Captcha Grails Jawin JRuby Extras log_buddy MultiRails Radiator Smoke Signals spec_converter Safe ERB Streamlined Framework Tarantula Trac TagsPlugin We also have contributed to the following projects: attachment_fu cache_fu JRuby Rails RedGreen test/spec/rails Typo

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