I repeat, what gaming commission? First, the company hadn't had any machines in the US for a long time, all of the development was made outside the US, despite the fact that the headquarters was there, and the division I built was an ocean away from there. Now think: do you really think they would care? Besides, to be able to put the machines in service in the US, one of the several certification companies there has to first approve the machines.
Above all, and already predicting a fuckload of jokes, leaking data, whatever the kind, is unprofessional and something I wouldn't do. What would be the point? What would I gain with that, besides seriously damaging my reputation when I got caught?
Actually, things are quite not like that. Law says that companies are expected to be compliant to standards and pass the certification tests before putting the machines on the market. The story just goes against the basic law of the gambling industry which is that the player's winnings have to be protected above all else. That's why even for the hardware, there is specialized hardware that has to conform to certain rules, such as including on board IO for buttons and lights, NVRAM to hold the game data so, on a power fail, the game can be resumed to the point when the machine went off, TPM chips, IO unlocking chips and some other characteristics. The "they don't need to be careful" is quite not right because that will depend a lot on the country where the machines are being used. And they need to remember that if a machine fails, instead of the money that the player loses, may be the company's money to be lost.
No, definitely not the same company. It was basically as you described. I forgot to mention the documentation part, points for you for remembering that. They didn't even knew what a wiki was (to say the least) and comments in the code were non-existing. My direct boss was the actual owner of the company and even though I got to admit that if he got to be rich, it was not for being stupid, no one can be always right and people, at a certain age, start losing it. He canceled all open positions for jobs, all R&D projects and even the designers were doing little less than designing business cards.
Actually, he doesn't. First there is nothing I can say to the gambling commission. To which commission would I complain? Of which country? The countries where the company develops machines or the countries where the company explores or sells them? What would I say exactly? I was there and did my best, enforcing completely different policies, imposing coding and formatting standards, building an appropriate IT infrastructure from scratch and training each of the new hires after having them go through hell before I decided whether they would deserve the job or not. Besides, I'm pretty sure it was/is not my job to do such a thing. Gaming commissions exist for a purpose, they are supposed to police supervise the business and I'm pretty sure that telling them that a company is trying hard to die is pretty useless.
1) what gaming commission? The company is spread around the world, with the first team of programmers being in a country one ocean away from the second, that was set up in my country. And in my country we couldn't even sell or explore the machines, just develop them.
2) don't forget that before machines can operate in a particular country they have to pass the analysis of that country's gambling commissions or certification companies and they must have access to the entire process, including source code. For some reason, this particular company didn't have a single machine in the USA for several years.
3) what the hell would I say? "hey, the company that hired me to save it from itself had bad practices before I joined it"?
Last year I joined (and left) a major manufacturer of slot machines. I was hired as R&D manager and I was absolutely terrified when I saw how things were done. No good software development practices, their concept of version management was dumping source on a network share, the previous manager was the only one using a VCS and was for his private use, and the code was absolutely disappointing to say the least. The bad practices were so deeply marked on them that things were taken to a new facility, with an entire new team that I personally interviewed and trained them from the start, people that still didn't have any of the bad habits the old team had. Eventually I left because whoever was above me was far worse and I soon realized the company was off to die, because top level management were the ones that messed up in the first place and were about to destroy the company by killing all R&D and training and having the new team do sustained engineering on the bad code produced by the old team. This is the state of the gambling industry.
Yeah, I've been on a short fuse and anti-psicotics.
Not sure what you mean by a limited number of fingers... we're not talking about Emacs and its quadruple bucky keystrokes
Macs have some of those.
However, I fully agree that Apple's idea of useful key bindings is sometimes ridiculous.
Precisely. Besides, never in my life I experienced a platform so non-uniform when it comes to key combinations, despite the apparent tidy environment it has.
"If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."
Sorry, I have never been so pissed of in my/. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".
People that don't use the whole keyboard and key combos have no idea how much productivity they are throwing away. That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.
Instead of a bunch of exploits and cracks and whatever, I'd currently settle for having the full functionality of my PS3 slim restored, so I can use sound over HDMI again, something I can no longer do since 3.42.
there is a great lack of organization in some universities in Portugal. teachers all the time plan out of class work that greately exceeds any reasonable work amount and totally disregarding the fact that there are more classes than the ones they teach.
I didn't say Arizona should be doing it. But seems a bit funny that people are now implementing and complaining about something that has been done for several years in a country far far away that most americans can't distinguish as an independent country and rarely can spot on a map.
why the continuous necessity to subvert the system?
The problem isn't in having the RFID system. It's the underlying reason that ended up requiring it. It's just a case of trying to fix mistakes with other mistakes. Basically, a poor class and semester planning by the teachers overloads the students so badly that they don't even have time to pee, let alone to themselves and to do homework. To aggravate the situation, a lot of students have to work to support not only themselves but their families. The day has only 24 hours and you need to sleep at least eight (which none of them do). Where do they get the time? From the classes, so they end up doing all the work in class time and attending only the final exams. Hence the class presence rate drops.
I used to have a laptop where I had to use the fn key to access the home, end, pgup and pgdn keys. After much effort in trying to get used to that, I sacrificed other keys to have those available by remapping the x11 keymaps.
Fn + Arrow Keys does all that -- or at least does on my old G4 powerbook.
I said INSTEAD OF A KEY COMBO. I use all the editing combinations. Humans have a limited amount of fingers and a limited stretching width. So, yes, one more key when you want to use ctrl+shift+home and stuff like that does tend to make a difference.
About the Intel chip... besides being the only chip that I came to feel confident in, my work is not just hard disk based. I do work (development) related to networking and a decent chip does tend to make a difference.
And yes. The repeated "does tend to make a difference" was on purpose.
This is Sony's way of enforcing users to update so they cannot crack the bitchmachine. Everybody was saying "don't update your PS3 if you want to be able to run linux and to crack the bitchmachine..." well, now you have it.
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I repeat, what gaming commission? First, the company hadn't had any machines in the US for a long time, all of the development was made outside the US, despite the fact that the headquarters was there, and the division I built was an ocean away from there. Now think: do you really think they would care? Besides, to be able to put the machines in service in the US, one of the several certification companies there has to first approve the machines.
Above all, and already predicting a fuckload of jokes, leaking data, whatever the kind, is unprofessional and something I wouldn't do. What would be the point? What would I gain with that, besides seriously damaging my reputation when I got caught?
Actually, things are quite not like that. Law says that companies are expected to be compliant to standards and pass the certification tests before putting the machines on the market. The story just goes against the basic law of the gambling industry which is that the player's winnings have to be protected above all else. That's why even for the hardware, there is specialized hardware that has to conform to certain rules, such as including on board IO for buttons and lights, NVRAM to hold the game data so, on a power fail, the game can be resumed to the point when the machine went off, TPM chips, IO unlocking chips and some other characteristics. The "they don't need to be careful" is quite not right because that will depend a lot on the country where the machines are being used. And they need to remember that if a machine fails, instead of the money that the player loses, may be the company's money to be lost.
No, definitely not the same company. It was basically as you described. I forgot to mention the documentation part, points for you for remembering that. They didn't even knew what a wiki was (to say the least) and comments in the code were non-existing. My direct boss was the actual owner of the company and even though I got to admit that if he got to be rich, it was not for being stupid, no one can be always right and people, at a certain age, start losing it. He canceled all open positions for jobs, all R&D projects and even the designers were doing little less than designing business cards.
I think you missed the point entirely.
But that's precisely the point. But if the code is not good enough, they end up spending more money than if things were done right from the get go.
says the anonymous coward.
Care to elaborate?
Actually, he doesn't. First there is nothing I can say to the gambling commission. To which commission would I complain? Of which country? The countries where the company develops machines or the countries where the company explores or sells them? What would I say exactly? I was there and did my best, enforcing completely different policies, imposing coding and formatting standards, building an appropriate IT infrastructure from scratch and training each of the new hires after having them go through hell before I decided whether they would deserve the job or not.
Besides, I'm pretty sure it was/is not my job to do such a thing. Gaming commissions exist for a purpose, they are supposed to police supervise the business and I'm pretty sure that telling them that a company is trying hard to die is pretty useless.
I could, but:
1) what gaming commission? The company is spread around the world, with the first team of programmers being in a country one ocean away from the second, that was set up in my country. And in my country we couldn't even sell or explore the machines, just develop them.
2) don't forget that before machines can operate in a particular country they have to pass the analysis of that country's gambling commissions or certification companies and they must have access to the entire process, including source code. For some reason, this particular company didn't have a single machine in the USA for several years.
3) what the hell would I say? "hey, the company that hired me to save it from itself had bad practices before I joined it"?
Last year I joined (and left) a major manufacturer of slot machines. I was hired as R&D manager and I was absolutely terrified when I saw how things were done. No good software development practices, their concept of version management was dumping source on a network share, the previous manager was the only one using a VCS and was for his private use, and the code was absolutely disappointing to say the least. The bad practices were so deeply marked on them that things were taken to a new facility, with an entire new team that I personally interviewed and trained them from the start, people that still didn't have any of the bad habits the old team had. Eventually I left because whoever was above me was far worse and I soon realized the company was off to die, because top level management were the ones that messed up in the first place and were about to destroy the company by killing all R&D and training and having the new team do sustained engineering on the bad code produced by the old team. This is the state of the gambling industry.
You pick THIS moment to be pissed off?
Yeah, I've been on a short fuse and anti-psicotics.
Not sure what you mean by a limited number of fingers... we're not talking about Emacs and its quadruple bucky keystrokes
Macs have some of those.
However, I fully agree that Apple's idea of useful key bindings is sometimes ridiculous.
Precisely. Besides, never in my life I experienced a platform so non-uniform when it comes to key combinations, despite the apparent tidy environment it has.
yeah, that's a great keyboard for laptops
"If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop."
Sorry, I have never been so pissed of in my /. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".
People that don't use the whole keyboard and key combos have no idea how much productivity they are throwing away. That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.
I've updated to 3.50 before posting the comment you replied to. And no, it still doesn't work.
As I said, I don't care about the cracks, I just want my sound back.
Instead of a bunch of exploits and cracks and whatever, I'd currently settle for having the full functionality of my PS3 slim restored, so I can use sound over HDMI again, something I can no longer do since 3.42.
there is a great lack of organization in some universities in Portugal. teachers all the time plan out of class work that greately exceeds any reasonable work amount and totally disregarding the fact that there are more classes than the ones they teach.
you only say that because you only know that reality.
I didn't say Arizona should be doing it. But seems a bit funny that people are now implementing and complaining about something that has been done for several years in a country far far away that most americans can't distinguish as an independent country and rarely can spot on a map.
why the continuous necessity to subvert the system?
The problem isn't in having the RFID system. It's the underlying reason that ended up requiring it. It's just a case of trying to fix mistakes with other mistakes. Basically, a poor class and semester planning by the teachers overloads the students so badly that they don't even have time to pee, let alone to themselves and to do homework. To aggravate the situation, a lot of students have to work to support not only themselves but their families. The day has only 24 hours and you need to sleep at least eight (which none of them do). Where do they get the time? From the classes, so they end up doing all the work in class time and attending only the final exams. Hence the class presence rate drops.
I don't know what the fuss is about. That's being done in some universities in Portugal for some years now.
I used to have a laptop where I had to use the fn key to access the home, end, pgup and pgdn keys. After much effort in trying to get used to that, I sacrificed other keys to have those available by remapping the x11 keymaps.
Fn + Arrow Keys does all that -- or at least does on my old G4 powerbook.
I said INSTEAD OF A KEY COMBO.
I use all the editing combinations. Humans have a limited amount of fingers and a limited stretching width. So, yes, one more key when you want to use ctrl+shift+home and stuff like that does tend to make a difference.
About the Intel chip... besides being the only chip that I came to feel confident in, my work is not just hard disk based. I do work (development) related to networking and a decent chip does tend to make a difference.
And yes. The repeated "does tend to make a difference" was on purpose.
I'll consider buying one when they finally get the editing keys (home, end, pgup and pgdn) instead of a key combo and and Intel Gigabit chip.
This is Sony's way of enforcing users to update so they cannot crack the bitchmachine. Everybody was saying "don't update your PS3 if you want to be able to run linux and to crack the bitchmachine..." well, now you have it.