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User: grahamwest

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  1. Re:Streaming Video on Google Debuts Video Games Streaming Service Stadia (polygon.com) · · Score: 1

    It's different from the mainstream, but not new. Lots of companies have tried this in various forms. The standalone ones have all gone out of business (e.g. OnLive). The ones that are offered as part of a larger service (e.g. PlayStation Now) are plugging along with limited success.

    The only novel bit of tech here is being able to pause and resume on different devices. Everything else (e.g. broadcasting, saving highlights) was offered by previous entrants. The most successful games in the world are all twitch games (e.g. Fortnite, FIFA) and latency kills the experience.

  2. Re:Box trucks, not trailers you idiot. on Two Miles From Facebook's Headquarters, Working Poor Live In Trailers (mercurynews.com) · · Score: 1

    I live in downtown San Jose. I've seen plenty of RVs, almost all pretty old and shabby looking, but never a box truck.

  3. Re:Open and shut cases for the taking on Former NASA Engineer Designed Glitter Bomb Trap To Avenge Amazon Delivery Theft Victims (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Turns out they have been, at least in New Jersey.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

  4. As a former H-1B and current Green Card holder on H-1B Visa Use Soared Last Year At Major Tech Firms (phys.org) · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was always paid the prevailing rate, and the other H-1Bs I've worked with get the same. Put it this way, they're able to get on the housing ladder in Silicon Valley. They're also really smart! Indian, German, Chinese, Canadian, British (like me), they've all been good colleagues. There may well be plenty of poor quality H-1Bs at outsourcing companies, but I've never worked anywhere that used them.

    I've given enough job interviews in my time and have always recommended people by merit. If there were more qualified Americans applying for these jobs, they'd be getting hired. I recommended plenty of Americans and they usually worked out well. Sponsoring H-1Bs is expensive and a pain in the ass. Companies don't do that unless they have to. They also have to keep dealing with it because the time to get a green card has grown from about 3 years (when I did it 15 years ago) to over a decade in many cases.

    And don't give me that ageism thing. I'm 45 and have no trouble getting hired, and neither did the older candidates I recommended. When you're growing fast you want all kinds of people, and the varied experience and attitudes they bring make everyone more productive.

  5. I am a game developer. Arenanet made a big mistake on Game Company Fires Two Employees Who Complained About 'Mansplaining' on Twitter (theverge.com) · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I read what the guy wrote, and what she said in response. Arenanet fucked this up bigtime and I expect a lot of devs there - especially their writers - will be looking at exit strategies. There are plenty of other game companies in Seattle. They will contact Arenanet employees and attempt to poach them.

    Jessica Price wrote this long, nuanced article about the way to make the player feel they are participating in the world without breaking the way players project their own personality into their characters. In MMOs (I've worked on two) your character is an avatar; it's yourself in the virtual world. It's not like most games where you're operating an already defined character.

    The guy (Deroir I think is his name) replied to this with a suggestion so insultingly simple it deserved scorn. He was polite, but it was a REALLY condescending response. Imagine you drive a truck on a really tricky route and write about all the things you contend with. You've been doing this successfully for years. Then someone says, politely, but meaning to educate you, "if you turned the wheel and used the gas at the same time, how about that?" That's a thing deserving only scorn.

    She unloaded on him pretty hard, but it was the right way to nip that idiocy in the bud. If she hadn't most likely a whole bunch of other people would've chimed in with similar stupidity. Arenanet management immediately fired her, plus a colleague who had made a few mild comments in support of her.

    Bottom line; your staff are the most important thing you have. If you throw talented long-time staff members to the wolves, you stand a good chance of wrecking your relationship with your staff. Everybody else will see that as ruthlessness and feel fear!

    Personally I will now never even consider working with Arenanet's leadership and other devs I know are saying the same thing. That the guy has some sort of business relationship with Arenanet only makes it worse; Now every time the company signs a deal with someone the staff will wonder if that person will endanger their career. The game biz is cut-throat; a little self-inflicted wound can have major effects. Arenanet are probably going to suffer the consequences in an ugly way.

  6. Re:Please also remember to fill the survey on Ask Slashdot: What Kind of Societies Will the First Mars Colonies Be? · · Score: 1

    If this is being done for research, is there a link to the review board and/or the organisation gathering the data?

  7. Re:Marc Benioff is a swine on Facebook Should Be 'Regulated Like Cigarette Industry', Salesforce CEO Says (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Nice sig. Clever way of obfuscating it.

  8. Re:Ageism myth? on Will Millennials Be Forced Out of Tech Jobs When They Turn 40? (ieeeusa.org) · · Score: 1

    This is my experience too. I'm at a company with lots of late-20s engineers, but there's a cadre of older people like me (I'm 44). We bring a different sensibility to the team and thus diversity of ideas and techniques. There's a synergy that improves the output of all the engineers.

    If you can show your programming chops on a whiteboard, that you're good at learning new things and that you have the drive to get things done when everyone else is working extra hours the smarter companies will pick you up at least in Silicon Valley. Those smarter companies are usually looking to keep the number of extra hours down, because they want to keep their good staff. There are loads of mediocre programmers here of all ages; beat their skills and doors can still open.

  9. Wanting foreign workers to leave the country by fearing they'll be shot seems to meet that definition to me.

  10. Re:/. editors: why do you maintain this shit hole? on Garmin Engineer Shot And Killed By Man Yelling 'Get Out Of My Country!' (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Careful who you call noob...

  11. Re:Hello, this is Windows technical support on Canada and USA Feds Unite To Fight Spammers and Telemarketers · · Score: 1

    I managed to get one of those guys to talk to me "honestly" for a while. He started his patter and I said I knew this was a ransomware scam. I politely asked what his plans in life were.

    We played a little guessing game about where they're based, since the accent is obviously Indian-subcontinent. Took me a couple of tries, but the answer is Sri Lanka. I suggested he learn to program if he wanted to have a more successful career.

    The next time one of them called I asked how the weather was in Columbo that evening and blew his mind a little bit.

  12. A problem that will solve itself before too long on Oculus Founder: Rift Will Come To Mac If Apple "Ever Releases a Good Computer" (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    GPUs and CPUs keep getting faster and faster. It won't be long before phones come with better silicon than a PS4/Xbox One. Two refreshes of iMac or Macbook and they'll be good enough for VR. Luckey's right that there's no point doing anything before then of course.

  13. Re:Might be illegal on Elon Musk Cancels Stewart Alsop's Tesla Order Over Complaints About Launch Event · · Score: 1

    That's pretty much the definition of a contract. Consideration (e.g. money) in exchange for service. If the contract has a clause saying the seller can refund the deposit and cancel the order, then the buyer agreed to that and too bad.

    However, there is also civil law regarding business - the Uniform Commercial Code in the USA. That law preempts contract terms. The question then becomes, does the UCC forbid those kind of clauses. A little research leads me to believe it does not. That would make sense since companies like Gamestop cancel pre-orders all the time.

    Given all that, Tesla are within their rights to say, "too bad, here's your money back".

  14. Re:Can we stop this ? on NASA Safety Panel Finds Concerns With the Journey To Mars (examiner.com) · · Score: 1

    NASA Ames had an interesting concept for that, which is not only to use the large amount of water a long-duration mission would need as shielding, but to use the "waste products" of the astronauts to replace that shielding as the water was lost (extremely hard to avoid small losses even with really good recycling tech).

    Getting the mass off Earth is expensive but not difficult per se. Re-usable launchers will change that game, because the amount of mass per launch is flexible, unlike launching a giant space station. Water's water, whether it takes 15 launches or 17 isn't that big a deal.

  15. Re:Private companies aren't taking us to Mars on NASA Safety Panel Finds Concerns With the Journey To Mars (examiner.com) · · Score: 1

    I think that's an unfair characterisation of what SpaceX has done/is doing.

    Landing an intact first stage after it was travelling 6,000mph the other direction is pretty groundbreaking. Propulsive landing of a space capsule for re-use is pretty major too. That one's only partially demonstrated, but it's not the blocker in Dragon 2 progress and the work on Falcon 9 re-use feeds into it as well.

    Then there's the Raptor engine, most of the way through the development with some components already tested to a high degree. A full-flow gas-gas staged combustion engine and a large one at that. No-one's built an engine like that before. The Russians had the RD-270, which does most of this (and was 3x the thrust, which is very impressive indeed) but not with cryogenic propellants nor having them be fully gaseous when they drive the turbopumps. Mastering all the technologies for that is a big deal.

  16. Re:is it just me, on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Moving To Per-Core Licensing (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Because there are 10-core processors.

  17. Re:They all suck on Ask Slashdot: Selecting a Version Control System For an Inexperienced Team · · Score: 1

    I've worked on game projects over the last fifteen years which used Perforce for millions of files and terabytes of data, and to my knowledge we never once had anything get corrupted.

    Can you describe some of the times your stuff got broken by Perforce?

  18. Re:What about the Greek alternative? on Greece Rejects EU Terms · · Score: 1

    Because the EU doesn't believe for an instant that the plan proposed by the Greeks will work. To be fair, I think they're right about that. However, the EU's plan is even less likely to work and will probably do a lot more damage - the IMF have themselves admitted that in recent days.

  19. Re:While we're at it... on Ask Slashdot: What's the Harm In a Default Setting For Div By Zero? · · Score: 1

    On a Vax you could dereference a NULL pointer and get zero.

    http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...

  20. I like the new format for these on Cable Companies Hate Cord-Cutting, but It's Not Going Away (Video) · · Score: 1

    Frankly I don't give a shit about your videos. I watched one once and it was amateurish and painful.

    The transcript, that's what I want, and now you've provided it. Make the video as long or as short as you want, just keep the transcript.

  21. Re:I don't understand the big deal on Researcher: Drug Infusion Pump Is the "Least Secure IP Device" He's Ever Seen · · Score: 2

    These are not patient-portable devices. They attach to an IV pole and control delivery of whatever drug is fed from the bag. They're modular, so they get mixed and matched from pole to pole (and presumably some stash on the ward) as necessary. They are not isolated; they communicate with other systems on the ward so that, for example, the nurse can come by and check on the patient when the bag is empty.

    Getting access to one of these wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Go to the ER with something that will get them to give you IV fluid and you'll find yourself left alone with one of these pumps. Install a worm and over time you'll have a lot of devices at your command and perhaps have gathered a lot of information into the bargain.

  22. Re:Write-only code. on Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? · · Score: 2

    C++ templates are also Turing-complete at compile time.

    When I tried learning a bit of LISP, the thing that struck me was that its metaprogramming language is also the runtime language, and I like that very much.

  23. Re:Write-only code. on Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? · · Score: 1

    I'm not a Linux programmer so I may be out of date on this, but there isn't or wasn't a single C++ ABI on Linux between the various compilers. If the kernel used C++ for those interfaces it would potentially require that the kernal and all kernel modules were compiled with the same toolchain. Rolling their own implementation means the ABI is compatible across all the different compilers and compiler version with a side benefit of being able to write kernel modules in languages other than C/C++.

  24. Re:This sounds silly ... on Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds · · Score: 1

    I read the paper and their premise seems to be that MINSETs can be browsable/searchable and good enough to let programmers figure out whether a given function is worth investigating further. Basically they're a better replacement for text search and class browsing.

    I'm skeptical about that, especially looking at their examples, but I can't dismiss it outright. I think it might interact in a favourable way with metaprogramming techniques, whether C++ templates or Lisp macros, but that's just speculation.

  25. Re:wow on Lockheed Claims Breakthrough On Fusion Energy Project · · Score: 1

    Can you explain in more detail? It wasn't clear to me how this problem was handled. I did a little research and learned that the fast neutrons cause neutron activation, creating often long-lived radioactive isotopes of what they hit - which will generally be the reactor containment walls.

    He did mention breeding tritium via lithium, so is the idea to plate the inner walls of the reactor with lithium? In that case, does the amount of tritium generated balance with the amount consumed? Or, does that just naturally reach equilibrium?

    In any case, I think all of this is only alluded to in the video. If you have more insight, I think it would be useful to share it.