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Perth Game Company CEO Takes IP By Night
snicho99 writes "A US owned gaming company has fled Australia, leaving unpaid employees and a massive tax bill. Apparently many staff have been working unpaid for months to allow their game to ship and hopefully the company to recover. Interzone's Perth (Western Australia) office was created with the assistance of a state government grant. Last week Interzone's (American) CEO
entered the building at night and removed all the servers and IP so that Interzone could continue production at a new company they have opened in Ireland. The staff caught him on camera. More background here."
> Australia is part of Asia.
Depending on which list of continents you go by, there are a lot of variations. The geographers, geologists, and sociologists can't seem to agree on a single definition, so it can be a bit confusing. How many continents are there, anyway? Five? Six? Seven? More?
For instance, there are variously considered to be one, two, or three continents in the western hemisphere. Two is the most common figure, but it's not universal.
Europe may or may not be part of the same continent as Asia. I even saw one list that makes Africa part of the same continent as Eurasia, since they're connected.
Some lists omit Antarctica entirely, since it has no permanent inhabitants.
But for all that, I have never seen a list that made Australia part of Asia. Usually it's a continent all by itself. Frequently it's part of a "continent" called "Oceania", which also includes most of the islands in the Pacific (but not the ones that are very close to another continent, such as Taiwan or Vancouver Island). Sometimes only a few islands are included as part of Australia -- Tasmania, New Guinea, etc. I've even seen definitions that include New Zealand as part of Australia but NOT New Guinea (which was listed as part of Asia).
I have even seen occasional claims that Australia is an island, not part of any continent at all. (These claims generally come from laypersons and usually involve comparison to Greenland; typically the person making the assertion has been looking at Mercator-projection maps.)
But this is the first time I have EVER seen anyone list Australia as part of Asia. That's totally unprecedented.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Which do you choose? The second option is a waste of time. The first is a guaranteed loss. The third is a gamble, where you potentially have a bigger loss, but potentially have a gain. I know people working for small businesses who have received nice bonuses for choosing option 3, and others who have had the company fold owing them back pay. If you don't have another job lined up to start immediately, it's often a good idea to try to keep the company afloat while you look for other employment as a backup.
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I find that attitude patronising in the extreme. Many more than 1% are engineers. Engineering practice is defied by the discipline not some god of engineering and there are many good sets of practices in the industry.
Personally, I design and implement high throughput, low latency server software that deals with mission critical data and/or financial transactions. I consider myself an engineer. Please don't pull out either of the old fallacies that engineers are either personally, legally, responsible for any failing in their work (demonstrably untrue in civil or other engineering firms where the company may be responsible but the individual is not) or that "you're an engineer when the thing you designed kills someone if it goes wrong" because that puts many electronic engineers in the "not engineer" camp and many software guys in the engineer camp.
Is every programmer a "Software Engineer"? I don't know, but I dislike the dismissive attitude.
No, it's interesting that the manager showed up and seized the equipment without an opportunity for employees to clear personal data or office possessions. That's pretty unusual.
I've seen small companies closing their doors under different, but similarly awful circumstances. (Power being cut, losing their network feed due to non-payment, unpaid-for equipment being seized, etc.) An important rule for employees facing such troubles is to make sure you have all legal documents in off-site backup. Follow your contracts, but make sure your payment records, stock information, signed contracts, etc. are available offline. And consider whether to back up your work and email offsite or on separate media: I've actually been offered a return consulting job to come back and reconstruct work that I'd done and they'd deleted all source code for, as part of purging my old accounts. Since I;d been there as a corporate partner, and they tried to pay me under the table and not notify my company, I contacted our sales and legal departments. It turned out they hadn't paid six months of outstanding bills, and hiring me behind my company's back would have been much cheaper for them and much more profitable for me, but would have left my employer with much less leverage to get paid.
Fortunately for me, the key work I'd done had actually already been submitted to the relevant open source project's main codelines, so it wasn't lost. And they hadn't noticed the explanations in my contract about what working on GPL tools nad publishing them to that client meant, that they were under GPL. We actually managed to get them to cough up at least some of the backpay, mostly for explaining where to to get the updates.
Interestingly, this is almost exactly what the US headquarters of Lehman Brothers did immediately before the collapse - repatriated all the cash from overseas operations to pay US staff and creditors before anyone else.
[FUCK BETA]
I stand corrected, apparently the scheme was brought in by the Howard government and I was using outdated personal anecdote. My brother-in-law lost ~$10K when the panel beaters he was working for in the 90's went tits up. Part of that $10K was super that had not been paid for almost a year. The bank came in and auctioned all the equipment in the shop, the employees saw none of the proceeds.
:)
Thanks for the education.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Cool, a quiz!
What is a Fourier (or Laplace) transform?
A certain linear transform that maps function points to orthogonal set of functions that self-convolve onto itself and to "zero" with others.
What is a convolution?
For finite signals, draw a signal using another as a "brush", adding up the overlapping parts :)
Alternatively, multiply the corresponding frequencies. The integral definition is a bit backwards with that pesky minus sign.
What is an RMS mean compared to an average?
Something totally different. RMS represents energy. Average just position.
What is a duty cycle?
How do you apply Kirchoff's law to a circuit?
What is the time constant of an RC circuit, and what does it mean?
What is the resonance frequency of an RLC circuit?
No idea.
What is the nyquist frequency?
The maximum width of frequency band that be reproduced correctly from sampled signal. Or half of it if you go complex and consider negative frequencies too.
What does a PID controller do?
What is a normal force?
Umm.. force minus tangent force? :)
What is Colomb's Law?
What conditions are needed to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor?
Explain what a conduction band is.
What is a triple point for a material?
Heat/pressure combination where three phases meet.
What happens to the orbitals of atoms as they are brought closer together?
They become quantized due to pauli exclusion principle bringing the matter into degenerate state?
How can you make steel conduct heat better, and what are the drawbacks?
What is metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level?
What is Newton's Law of Cooling?
What does the Reynolds number tell you?
Something about when the flow becomes turbulent but the exact definition is faint.
What is a Carnot engine and why is it special?
What should the flow velocity be directly on a surface experiencing laminar flow?
Constant?
Okay, I fail. Now let's try some counterquestions:
What does it mean for something to be NP-complete?
What is the golay code?
What is the hotelling transform?
How would you apply it on statistics?
Explain the difference between O() and o().
What is the busy beaver function and what makes it special?
What is the finite element method?
Why are denormals needed and what are the practical downsides?
What is a deadlock? Can you avoid it?
What does abstraction elimination mean?
How do you parallelize an adder?
How can you make password hashes secure against precalculated look-up tables?
What is the relationship with BWT and the Psi-function?
Okay, I wasn't actually arguing against your point. Just pouring gasoline onto the tough engineers vs. wimpy programmers war:)
However, mathematically I don't see much difference between engineering and good software engineering. Sure, it's working with black boxes, but if you just.. abstract the black box into a parameter you get a pure box that works with any black boxes as long as they function within specifications :)