TimothyFitz

Did the article change? Currently it reads "According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk" which answers your question succinctly.

Unfortunately their blog's "example" is just a static image (what are they thinking?). If you want to actually see samples of what the fonts look like go directly to the Font Directory: http://code.google.com/webfonts

IMVU is proud to be (one of the last?) users of Pixomatic, Michael Abrash and Mike Sartain's commercial software 3d renderer. Even today there's a surprising demand for software 3d rendering, especially in the laptop/netbook space: many (potential) users out there have terrible intel graphics accelerators but fairly fast dual core systems.

Not quite accurate. The code he wrote does the "proxy" logic while libraries underneath it are doing the work of parsing HTTP. He's definitely not doing "calls into a lib that implements an http proxy."

More to the point, what he has is a proxy in 20 lines of code which will let him make, say, a custom load balancing http proxy in 40 lines of code.

What's the link between blocks/grand central and multitasking on the iPhone?

The way my prof told it: "I'm really not sure why people keep asking if P=NP. Of course it does, when N=1."

I really really expected this to be an Onion-style parody of the posts following the formula: "What UNRELATED BUT SHOCKING ACTIVITY taught me about my business".

After his contracting he worked with me at IMVU; I learned a lot from him. He left IMVU for the University of Chicago Economics PhD program.

I can't wait to see what he'll do next.

A very similar game was released in 2006 called The Ship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_(video_game)

You can even get it on steam today http://store.steampowered.com/app/2400/

While it's not illegal to take "friends & family" investment, it adds a lot of legal headache and it's something VCs really don't want to deal with. Startup Lawyer puts it better than I can: http://thestartuplawyer.com/convertible-notes/life-is-too-sh...

> There's none of that nice, slow maturation of product and increased customer base you may get if you make, eg, bug tracking or database software, operating systems etc. Each release is potentially a very big, maybe-the-company-won't-survive flop.

What you're saying is that "VCs shouldn't invest in studio based game companies" and I think you're right. There are other development models that do not have the same schedule/single-release problems. Free to play is the first that comes to mind, just looking around at the facebook scene (where games are launched and often fall flat until someone iterates and finds the right spark, only to then watch their game blow up). Another example would be WoW. They did a lot of things right at launch but if you look at the product today it really shines from the years of public iteration it's been able to go through.

Unfortunately those development models really don't work for boxed retail console games today, so there are lots of valid reasons to work in a studio model.

Get an explicit written contract from your employer that your side projects are yours and yours alone (a nihil obstat), and then stop worrying about the small stuff like this.

Agreed. Reading the digg article I'm interpreting their perf claim to mean "on a loaded server in our cluster, if we try to do this query on a cold cache it takes 1.5 seconds to complete", because this is exactly how I would measure the performance.

When I test the performance of a query, I query a live mysql node (or at least a live replicated standby) of some data that's not actively being used (to give a realistic "cold-cache" scenario, even though the caches aren't necessarily cold).

If digg used this method, it would completely account for performance discrepancy. Digg did not release a benchmark, and trying to treat their findings as a repeatable benchmark is wrong.

I think there's a fair point to make that calling one person a psychopath and another person not a psychopath is a purely arbitrary line drawn in the sand. Hare's test measures various responses and draws an arbitrary line (30 of 40 points) between which someone is or is not a psychopath.

It's a classical false dichotomy that the article promotes in sensationalist terms.

One of the not so obvious problems with Steam (which I love and use regularly) is that all your eggs are in one basket. If, for whatever reason, Steam decides they're going to cut you off then you'll lose access to all of your games.

A real world example of this is a friend who purchased a Steam game which did not work on his computer (unrelatedly due to overzealous DRM). Steam would not refund his purchase so he threatened to file a credit card chargeback and they replied that their policy in the event of a chargeback is to disable all of the users games immediately. Because he had >$300 tied up in Steam he wasn't about to lose it all over a $60 charge.

I'm not sure where the "there would be no touch without Apple" quote comes from (parent's parent may have edited) but I agree it's false. Trivially provable, since Apple did not invent multitouch, they purchased the company/guy who did, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

ibb, at it's core, is just an in memory tree of the filesystem metadata. Search is implemented as a plugin that stores the file contents in memory.

And ibb is proof of concept, showing that O(1) is possible, desirable and useful. Having said that, I've been using it daily, because we have > 200MB of PHP/JS/CSS/HTML at IMVU.

Wish I could find the source, but the math is simple. If you're great (at programming and marketing yourself), you pick where you want to work and apply once (or more likely, are convinced to leave one good job for another). If you're good, you pick a few places and apply a handful of times. If you're bad, you end up applying constantly. The average unscreened resume is the average person in the job pool, who is well below the average programmer.

Of course cremation saves more space and is certainly cheaper.

The CLR (.NET Runtime) kinda does this. The host can substitute threading and I/O implementations. Msft's SQL Server actually does this; when you build C# stored procedures they're actually running on NT Fibers (green threads) with async I/O.

Love that this presentation really nails the fact that continuous deployment is effectively a side-effect of truly integrating Dev and Ops.

(At IMVU our VP of Operations is also our VP of Engineering)

He's confusing clicks with visits, which is probably the largest source of his discrepancy. In a nutshell clicks are a count of times a browser requests a page while visits are unique browser sessions: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...

I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the job fair. In my mind, most programmers aren't great at walking up to 20 random new people; it's draining for people who aren't naturally social (I know it's draining for me). Flipping up the natural order aligns the social people (Recruiters) with the social activities (Cold introduction, striking up a conversation).

For perspective, I'm going to the job fair looking for employees (IMVU Inc, we're hiring, we're awesome).

This is a summary of cryptographic hashes being broken via cryptanalysis (breaking the algorithm), not RSA keys (big primes) being factored. I'd love to see the same chart but for prime factorization.

Everyone underestimates the impact of removing the right 10 minutes from a process.

This is a great study of "what does an average gamer have?", for "what does an average casual game player have?" the unity hardware study is great http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/

Of note, a around 35-40% of unity users have Intel graphics hardware and have dramatically lower resolution screens.

Did the rules change to allow running code not bundled with the application or did this slip through Apple's review process?

Well, that explains my disbelief. Thanks!

Yeah, I have absolutely no idea why Web Sockets aren't just an initial HTTP request and then a protocol switch (Upgrade header); that would work for the vast majority of proxies and make cookies/same domain/etc work seamlessly.

Half.com (ebay) has it for $30 http://product.half.ebay.com/Peopleware_W0QQtgZinfoQQprZ6570...

It's probably worth the $95 anyway.