douche

Sandboxy games definitely have more replayability. If I look at my steam stats, Medieval Total War 2 is in the lead, followed by Paradox grand strategy games, Mount & Blade, Skyrim, then things like Terraria, Rimworld, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Gamedev Tycoon, and so on. I have to go pretty far to hit something with a defined story.

Mass Effect 1, at least, was most fun when you said to hell with the official objectives and just started treating it as a sandbox. I had so much fun using the sniper rifle from as far away as possible, or taking the mako places it really shouldn't have been able to go

Quite possibly we would have been saved the pain of the start screen, "Metro" apps, and maybe Cortana.

Maybe this is changing, but in my generation, gamers are typically more proficient in a lot of the low-level nuts and bolts. Modding was such a big force in pc gaming, and typically the tools to do it were a little sketchy and rough.

I remember hacking around in data files for Civilization II, or poking at python scripts for Mount & Blade, way before I learned any proper programming.

Hmm, I submitted this yesterday, but it got lost in the scrum.

It's always interesting to hear real reports from the trenches that aren't essentially ads for technology XYZ. I'm afraid that all too often, we make things more complicated for bad reasons; whether ignorance, chasing the latest trend, or resume-driven-development...

Once in a great while, unicorns are found.I

I'm still using Linq-to-SQL in the .net world. For 99% of what I need it to do, it works golden. Once in a while I've got to go in and profile and rewrite a query when somebody that doesn't know what they are doing has introduced an n+1 query, or done something overly "clever" that's resulted in gnarly SQL being generated.

Quite likely, the people that are capable of doing that sort of hard technical work are not capable of doing the soft, identity-politics ridden outreach functions, and vice versa.

Bang-up programmers are typically not the ones you want pressing flesh and pushing buzzwords.

Maybe there's some magical place where you can actually learn how to program from someone else, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for solitary hours grinding away actually doing the work.

In Bavaria, I've seen beer carts going along factory production lines at noon time, handing out a couple lagers with lunch. Didn't seem to affect quality, safety, or output.

I can't bring myself to watch espn any more. They've gutted so much of their actually insightful talent, while retaining the hot take artists and trolls. And I don't need to be constantly bombarded with left-wing propaganda and outrage with my sports scores.

In addition, their broadcasts are just not very good. Watching TNT and Espn during the NBA playoffs this year was like night and day.

That and their daily half-off sales have resulted in me spending far too much money on their books... At least they generally have good editing and a pretty high quality bar, better than I've seen with Packt or Apress.

Granted, I'm a redneck from the back woods, but there are lots of people I know that don't make $15/hour in skilled trades, let alone minimum wage jobs. If you're going to pay minimum wage of $15, then all other wagesshould correspondingly increase

They made fun of this, I believe, in 21 Jump Street (the remake).

Because it is JavaScript, and there's some kind of unspoken rule about not doing things properly and instead releasing broken things.

I would not terribly surprised... I already have an Amazon Chase credit card that gives me significantly more cash back for Amazon purchases.

I don't think Amazon is planning on a standing army or navy yet, however

It works for a while, until it crashes down, ala groupon

Blockchain is just another square on the enterprise bingo game. You know something has jumped the shark when IBM global services starts pushing it.

The British East India Company was able to do this; they issued their own currency at various times. I'm not sure we'll ever see a company with that kind of temporal power again, though.

Bubbles are inevitable. If you want to see a great historical example, read up on the South Sea Company of the 18th century. The charlatans are the same throughout time, just varying their methods slightly

Having the entire design of a system in your head is invaluable. I'm in that situation with one of the products I work on. It can be frustrating, at times, when there is more to do than one person can handle, and you have to delegate tasks out, so you end up spending much more time explaining how something works and guiding someone else as to how to implement a feature, than it would to just go in and make the necessary changes. Eventually, it does pay off, but it requires constant effort to keep abreast of the changes and document everything.

I had a lot of fun working through this in the context of building mazes, e.g. http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2015/11/28/upsilon-mazes.html

(not the author, just a guy who bought his book)

Similarly, very little of the trig and pre-calculus stuff that I had to learn in math class made any sense to me, until I either had to use it for drawing graphics with QBasic in my programming class, or for a plethora of things in my shop classes.

Green Day had their moment, although it has passed.

The Black Keys are good, but maybe not that mainstream.

The best show I've ever seen was Avenged Sevenfold, which is definitely in the metal niche. But I'll never forget when they had a break in the middle of the show, and their lead guitarist came out and just solo'd for a while. Incredible talent.

It's really a travesty how much of the twelve or thirteen years of compulsory schooling we waste, and how little return is generated from it

A large percentage of what was considered rock and roll in the 70s has migrated to be essentially under the country pavillion. The next Neil Young, or Greg Allman, or Bruce Springsteen will be lumped as a country singer.

You actually have to practice and have some skill to play guitar... not to mention finding a bassist, and an actual, real-life drummer, at minimum, for a full band.

Compared to dicking around with a laptop and calling yourself a DJ, or slapping some drum loops and autotune on top of some vocals, rock music does require some actual work.

Installing excel does heinous things. I try to keep my csvs opening in notepad++ to avoid corruption

Somedays, I dream of a world where the ancient chinese were exposed to alphabaeic scripts and decided that was a good idea, instead of sticking with characters.

Don t use Excel to edit csvs. It makes a hash of things at best, and frigs things up at worst.