randomacct44

Apparently it's real!

http://www.newsweek.com/crazy-genius-brand-guru-peter-arnell...

Yeah.

Sure, tape-out may be cheaper with one chip line, but we aren't talking about chips where the feature is there in silicon but intentionally disabled (say, for the other more expensive variant). We're talking about a feature that the chips and systems are advertised as having, which doesn't work as it is intended to because the driver stack is broken. Where the vendor specifically says '....supports OpenGL ES x.x', but then you find it sort of does but not really and it's broken and won't ever be fixed.

It's even more frustrating because there's a whole open-source community that would be willing to do the work of writing the drivers even, but then of course the vendors won't give them the data they need because of IP concerns. It just really sucks.

The utterly stupid thing is that the hype is what killed the game. Of course, then I guess they wouldn't have been able to charge AAA price for it and get away with it :/

I'm a fan of the space sim / massive universe concept and pretty much ignored most of the NMS hype, so I had no expectations going in. What I found when I did go in was an immediately recognizable game that I'd describe as Elite + Noctis with modern graphics. Which is fine, really. Particularly, anyone that loved playing Noctis would love playing NMS.

The problem is that price tag and the hype though. The game just doesn't have the staying power. I'd feel a bit better about the price tag if the studio communicated what they're doing more. I don't mind paying that price for a game in and of itself - games are expensive to make and I kinda hate the race-to-the-bottom that gives us things like freemium. However at this point, NMS feels abandoned by the studio and that's disappointing.

Jim Sterling did two excellent videos exploring the gaming hype culture and what everyone's roles were in this mess (the studio, Sony, the games press at large and the gaming public). They're worth watching in order for anyone that hasn't seen them:

Sky Hype (The Jimquisition): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_HEI8ZfDbM&t=847s

A Video Discussing Whether Or Not Hello Games Lied About No Man's Sky (The Jimquisition): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2qKAX_QaoI&t=72s

What the?

"When I was discharged from the hospital late the next day, the cabdriver asked me, “Where do I take you?” I couldn’t remember the name of my street. I handed him the discharge paperwork with my address on it, arrived home and slept for a long while."

How does someone who just had a stroke get discharged from hospital the next day, to a taxi?

AFAIK Android 6.0 and up lets you 'Format SD as internal storage' and from then on it's well, internal storage. I remember messing around with it on my Nexus Player awhile ago. In that particular case though, it did NOT handle unexpected power-downs at all well. I suspect it was a bug with remounting the encrypted filesystem on the card when booted back up next (where a Linux box would normally run fsck on it and then remount). I ended up doing some digging and filing a bug but never really getting motivated enough to stick with it.

FYI at least Samsung seem to be realizing their mistake as their latest models have the microSD card slot again after having abandoned it for some time, so it does seem like it's back.

I also have to concur with what others have said here - I've done my fair share of Raspberry Pi and ODROID-XU4 system image tinkering and come to the conclusion that microSD cards suck big time as a general purpose read/write storage device. I wouldn't feel comfortable having my phone's internal storage running off one actually.

Now if phones came with eMMC slots.... :)

This is what happens when the concepts of security, DRM and commercial restriction get entangled.

This reminds me of the PlayStation 3. It remained an un-hacked console for so long and the theory goes that the people who wanted to tinker with it could do so without being forced to fight on the same side as the bad guys, because Sony allowed 'Other OS'. When Sony closed off 'Other OS', this gave incentive for people to actually try and jailbreak the system [1].

Yet now the people that just wanted to tinker had to take the same route that people who just wanted to pirate would have to take. By locking the platform down further, Sony only succeeded in merging the two camps (benign tinkerers and pirates). I think there's a lot of validity in this theory.

It's a tough choice. As an iOS user I've long since come to the same acceptance as you - that the added security is worth the extra restrictions. Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Protecting your platform from hackers shouldn't be the same as protecting your platform from SNES emulators or games with adult themes.

[1] I believe it was this talk where this view was put forward, but I might be wrong (at work, can't really double-check): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR9tFXz4Quc

Reminds me of what happens when you step onto an escalator that isn't working (the broken escalator phenomenon):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_escalator_phenomenon

Got any references for this? I'm in Australia and have never heard this, nor have I seen such clauses in any non-competes that I've signed.

My current pet-peeve:

- If your code deals with values where the units of measure are especially important and where they may change for the same type of value in different contexts, PUT THE UNITS USED IN THE VARIABLE NAME!

I work primarily with systems that talk money values to other systems, some of which need values in decimal dollars (10.00 is $10.00) and some that need values in integer cents (1000 is $10.00).

Throughout our codebase this is often referred to helpfully as 'Amount', unfortunately :( So much easier when you can just look at the variable.... 'AmountCents' -- this naming convention alone would prevent some bugs I've had to fix.

Which points to something deeper that I've come to realize. Your code speaks to you, in the sense that when you come back to your own code 6 months later, there's a certain amount of "I don't know what this is doing" that you can chalk up to just not having looked at it for 6 months, but there is also an amount where you have to say "no, actually I didn't write this code clearly at the time". When evaluating my own progress that's a big metric I use - on average, how am I understanding my own code later?

What I try and watch out for in myself is when I find myself not making something explicit in the code because of domain knowledge that I have. The 'Amount' example is a good one of this. The domain knowledge is that I know this particular system wants values in decimal dollars -- I mean it's totally OBVIOUS isn't it? Why would I bother writing 'Cents' at the end for something so obvious?

Yet, even referencing domain knowledge is a higher cognitive load than just reading 'Cents' in the variable name. Not to mention the next engineer that comes along -- it's likely they won't have that bit of 'obvious' domain knowledge.

I would vote both 'Code Complete' and 'Clean Code' as two must-read books for any programmer.

Yep, it was a long time ago now :)

Dark Forces is one I haven't thought of in awhile - such a great story-based FPS.

I probably didn't make it as clear as I meant to - I wasn't so much referring to "when story-based first-person games started being made" as much as I was meaning to refer to "that point in time when people started criticizing games like Quake for not having a story".

I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.

I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).

The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.

It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.

I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.

I'm looking at Elm for a product that I'm working on at the moment. The language is great and I've wanted an excuse to do actual work in an ML-like language for a long time.

The difficulty I'm having at the moment is just trying to find examples of non-toy application architectures. An application with multiple top-level screens, for example.

For a bit of context, the product I'm working on is a customer-facing kiosk. It'll be driven by a C# ASP.NET back-end. We have several different products using common back-end code but exposing different sets of features to the customer. We're moving from an old architecture that was your standard WinForms UI to something using HTML5 as the UI layer (definitely a big mindset change!).

Right now I'm trying to figure out what the front-end Elm code structure would look like. Is it going to be one huge monolithic Elm project that covers all our cases? Can it be broken up? Does the front-end have to know in advance what screens will be available? (the back-end uses the typical 'load features as plugin DLLs') etc. These are all questions I'm facing right now.

This is especially exacerbated by the recent change from 0.16 to 0.17. The changes themselves seem extremely positive (I jumped in at 0.17, so I'm only going off an impression here) but much of the example material that I've found which might be useful is still using stuff from 0.16 and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it right now.

So from a commercial dev perspective, Elm, like anything else so new, is massively risky. I'm pushing on for the moment (would love any pointers if anyone has them!). I'm aware of the huge element of "not knowing what I don't know" that I've taken on right now. I'm hoping the payoff will be worth it :)

Totally not :) Just for reference, I'm not actually planning to build a safety-critical device with an ESP8266.

What piqued my curiosity was this project:

http://openaps.org

It's basically a homebrew controller implementation that uses data from a continuous blood glucose monitor to talk to an insulin pump. They're using Node and JavaScript from what I can tell from the GitHub. They're obviously conservative for safety concerns. The code runs on a Raspberry Pi 3.

This got me wondering - what language WOULD be used in 2016 to code something safety-critical? Is there anything coming from research that's better than C? My initial thoughts were something like Elixir, but really anything strongly type-checked and verifiable. Rust was another thought I had.

Looking at this my immediate thought was also "what's the tiniest micro that could do this job instead of the power-hungry Pi?".

I guess everything is C or assembler in the end anyway :) The impression I get from these responses is that a restricted subset of plain C seems to be the most practical solution today.

EDIT: I'm the OP if it isn't obvious, different account.

I'm interested in how you did handle the social aspects. What adjustments did you make? How did you handle the invites-to-lunch when you weren't really hungry?

That's one of my biggest issues. I'm on a meal plan at the moment which is great during my workdays and I'm really feeling good.... but then on the weekend when I'm not home and I'm visiting family or friends, I don't know how to stick to it without being a) extremely tempted by the food or b) potentially feeling rude or out-of-place (bringing my own food, etc).

Is there anything like this for JS + WebAudio? Have a mate who wants to be able to embed something like this in a website (endless generative music).

I don't quite understand it when people say that VR won't succedd but AR will. They're two points on a single technological continuum. One will enable the other. If AR does massively take off, all of that tech will benefit VR. Alternatively you can view AR as just a special case of VR, where display of the real world is passed through and where there's more sensing of the real-world environment for use in constructing the virtual parts of the environment. In that sense, VR is just a step towards more general AR; in that case the VR tech benefits AR applications.

Why do people insist that it can only be one OR the other? The technology is all converging to the one point. In fact I'd argue it's mostly the same technology. It's irrelevant as to whether it's AR or VR applications that break the technology into the mainstream. Once it's there, both AR and VR will have broken through.

Why can't I just talk to the bot on the website?

Garrr I must be getting old. I just can't be bothered signing up for any of those networks to try this. I already have SMS, Hangouts, Skype and WhatsApp to chat with. Don't need yet another password to add to the vault.

In particular reference to HN:

I read a comment somewhere (I think it was here, or perhaps another site) that Snowden was to HN what the SCO case was to Slashdot back in the day. That is - times were happier until it seemed like politics took over.

I'm not trying to knock either site. What I'm trying to get at is that there's a certain amount of group-think (group-angst in this case?) and if you immerse yourself exclusively in that, you start taking on that view. This 'existential angst' (I really can't think of a better term, though I know this isn't wholly adequate for what I'm trying to describe) is contagious.

HN became my daily news source when I finally got tired of Slashdot's political bent. After Snowden, HN has taken on a somewhat similar flavor. Don't get me wrong - I agree with a lot of it. I also know that sometimes I just have to step away from it, for my own happiness.

It's not about willful ignorance - it's about picking your battles and guarding your own interpretation and mood against the thoughts and mood of the group.

My question is - why are bus drivers such assholes (as depicted by the comments here)?

Serious question I'm curious about. Is this societal, is it a technology problem (do the way buses work somehow encourage this behavior towards other motorists), is it likely a combination of both?

I've been playing Clash Royale on iPad (it's a multiplayer battle game set in the Clash of Clans universe that essentially drops the base building element and concentrates on the strategic combat).

Generally, competitive multiplayer games can be pretty harsh (devolving into toxic) communities. Clash Royale addresses this problem in an interesting way. You're allowed to communicate with your opponent, but only from a fixed vocabulary. There's just no way to be really hostile - the closest it gets is an angry face, which says more "I'm frustrated!" than anything else. There are a few faces and some simple speech -- "Good luck!", "Well played!", etc.

This has a really nice effect - it's actually a pleasant game to play and it's pretty common to get a 'Good game' or 'Well played' at the end, or even during the game when you make a good move. It works well in this situation because it's a 1-vs-1 game -- you aren't coordinating complex actions with teammates, which is where I think something like this would fall down.

Without hostility being in the vocabulary to begin with, you don't really feel like anything is missing and it gets around the whole hurt-feelings problem of 'banning' nicely in this case.

It's funny -- on the one hand, people SAY they want this (only fully cooked new features). Yet everyone is really quick to jump up and down and complain and bash $company for lacking innovation when their new OS or the next version of their software comes out and the focus has been on stability/bug fixes.

Not just Wall-Street types either; I see this primarily from tech people. Examples: Android M, OS X Snow Leopard (I think, I may have that release wrong but there was one there that was definitely 'not many new features'), basically anything where the next version isn't predominantly new shiny.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Speaking of Sydney, are there many tech companies that allow remote work in Australia? (I'm a software developer, primarily .NET but also C++ and embedded firmware FWIW).

Are there any job sites / directories specifically for finding remote-work jobs?

As a fellow Aussie I'd love to work remotely, but I don't necessarily want to work for an overseas company, for example.

Yes they have -- the Samsung Gear VR. You wouldn't even know that it was associated with Facebook in any way. The Oculus Store is accessed via your Oculus account. There's literally no mention of Facebook anywhere (I'm not sure as I haven't used the particular app, but I haven't heard of the Oculus Social app on Gear VR being tied to Facebook either).

If Gear VR is any indication, then the fear that Facebook is going to mess with things obnoxiously is unfounded. I don't think we'd have as polished a product as we'll get with the retail Oculus version had the Facebook deal not happened.

Good. Fake rape claims are extremely damaging, not just to the people they're made against, but also to every single real victim of rape.

Far more pronounced. The FOV reduction doesn't come from the glasses frame so much as it comes from the glasses moving your eyes further away from the headset lenses than they would be without the glasses.

Ironically the AppleTV is currently the most 'open' in that regard for me - I can play all my iTunes content _and_ the Google YouTube app allows me to play my Play Store purchased content as well (it appears under 'Purchases' in 'My YouTube').

The YouTube app on AppleTV is a native app, not a wrapper. I don't know about the FireTV (on a side note, the YouTube app for Android TV is also a native app and not a wrapper).

I actually quite like the youtube.com/tv page as a good demonstration of a HTML5 app, though it has some navigation quirks. Before the Apple TV I had a NUC set up with Kodi and Chrome Launcher for when I wanted to use YouTube and I'd use the TV page exclusively.