cgarrigue

In some countries the archives can be browsed online so no need for such sites in this case.

But those services can still be useful to find an unknown branch of relatives when the ancestor who had emigrated in a different country didn't let any info regarding their previous life.

Interesting idea but I do not see the point: people are able to compute the same results mentally very easily.

By the way, I would suggest adding an option: how many consecutive days off does the company allow. And which days are absolutely not allowed to be taken.

10 years ago, in my company (based in Japan), taking a day off on the first day of the week (generally Monday unless there's an holiday) was not allowed due to the general meeting kicking off the week. This changed recently in my company but as this meeting is common in many Japanese companies, some companies might still apply this restriction.

Likewise, taking a day off before or after a holiday was not allowed except for some specific days (typically Golden Week end of April/beginning of May, Obon in August, and the end of year/New Year). This changed a few years ago.

There's the matter of scope but there's the matter of motivation too.

When an opensource application like GIMP, Blender, or even Manuksript for a lesser known example, are started, it's mainly because proponents of opensource want to use such application but dislike closed source. They fill a need, so getting new people willing to participate even after the people who started the project moved to something else is possible.

For an opensource game, whether a clone or not, the project is generally started because some proponents of opensource like the original game and want to share it with the community. But they are not really needed per se. That means it's more difficult to get new people joining the project, and consequently if the original team cannot keep getting motivated for many months/years, the project end up abandoned.

Yes, depending on where the stroke/aneurysm the effect can be totally different. I had one a few years ago, I was still able to chat with my colleagues and the hospital staff in Japanese and English, as well as in French (my native language) with my family back in France. However when looking at texts in French or English, I was recognizing the letters but putting them together I wasn't recognizing the meaning behind them. It took me a few days before being able to decipher them again, but it took me 3 weeks before recovering a decent reading speed. But some blood that had escaped in my skull at that time was blocking some nerves linked to the vision, so I had a dead angle of around 45 degrees on my right side until the blood naturally disappeared.

The interesting thing is that like many people, they guessed that a lot of people would be contaminated during the 3-day weekend a week ago (great weather, cherry blossoms, and last carefree moments for people who will start their first job on April 1st). It's not innocent that Abe called for postponing the Olympics just before that weekend. Koike could have asked the parks and popular venues (department stores) to be closed a week ago, but instead only asked people to refrain from going. What was poised to happen happened, and the number of infected people exploded half a week later.

It seems to work worldwide: I watch it from Japan. Interestingly most of the commercials are not displayed from here, instead we get the rolling presentation of the channel.

Luckily the work culture is slowly changing, at least regarding the matter of OT: following the suicide of a new recruit of Dentsu that was ruled to be a death by overwork, several companies started to ask their employees to refrain from doing OT.

However, as an engineer, it is sometimes quite frustrating to work with colleagues who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything. This seems to come from the way they learn things at school: the teacher is always right, because he's the teacher; you need to listen to your seniors, because they know more than you. This leads to new recruits being taught everything by senior staffers, even when the methods are bad. And of course this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.

On the other hand, for sure living here is great if you can live with the caveats of the Japanese society.

A friend who is freelance translator sponsored herself when renewing her work visa (previously she was a colleague of mine and our company sponsored her at that time, but since becoming freelance she's not employed by anybody but herself). She just had to produce proofs for each the recurrent contracts she's got so she can show that she's earning enough money. So yes, sponsoring yourself is possible, but it requires a lot of paperwork to prove you have the mean to live in the country.

I don't know how much difficult it is start your own business in Japan, for this Patrick is clearly the most knowledgeable person here, but once it's done, you just need to give yourself a salary to be able to renew your visa.

Salaries in Japan are much lower than in the Bay Area: many Japanese companies use a salary grid and reaching the 10 million yen mark requires decades in the same company. It might be possible to get such a salary much earlier in some startups, and it is certainly possible for people detached from a foreign company. For everybody else following the same route as Japanese people the highly skilled professional visa is very difficult to get.

The image you have is probably close to how in some societies 2 families decide their children are betrothed to each other.

The reality is closer to match making: some colleagues might introduce you to somebody who could be a match. Or maybe they will invite you to what is called a goukon, a group date where one of the male participants invite a few colleagues or friends of his who are single while his girlfriend invite the same number of female colleagues or friends of hers who are single.

There is indeed not tip. But he was comparing with the prices in USA, where you need to include tipping.

It's only cheap if you come to Japan for holidays, or if you're an expat detached by your company to Japan. If you're living in the country, receiving the same salary as any Japanese person, Tokyo is an expensive city. And I'm not even talking about language teachers, who cannot really live in Tokyo or all the Japanese people who are part-timers

Everywhere in the world salaries, rents and prices go hand in hand. Unless you're living on one side of a border and working on the other side (which is possible in EU) which allow you to game the system, rents and prices are based on supply and demand. Don't take it personally, but it does not make much sense to compare what you would get with a salary from one country while living in another country.

I wonder how much it comes from the culture in Korea. I've been living in Tokyo for 3 years, and although I never to the university here, I my observations in the country are that: * Korean people tend to stick together and don't mix much with other nationalities * Chinese people integrate so well that their Japanese friends and acquaintances barely notice they are not Japanese. And as they are not afraid to speak in English they're able to make English speaking friends too. * Unless they had some exposure to western countries, many Japanese people tend to be superficially friendly due to keeping their public persona separated from their true feelings (the 2 concepts of tatemae vs honne). And this not specific to making international friends, as they have themselves the same difficulty making Japanese true friends. * English speaking foreigners tend to hang out together or with English speaking Japanese people, unless they're introduced through a friend to Japanese people who can't speak English.

The question was about a tutorial for programmers. What would French brings in this context? There were some variants of basic in French, but nowadays I'm not convinced French is useful but for reading comments.

Going to SaaS can be quite an issue depending on the reliability of the company developing the software. One of the company I'm dealing with as a reseller had the bad habit of delivering releases with semi-critical issues and even regression bugs, consequently with my colleagues we decided to act as a buffer, doing a pass of QA ourselves, and depending on the results making the versions available or not to our customers. Sometimes it took one year before getting an good enough release. Quite annoying to do this ourselves, but at least our customers are satisfied with the quality.

Now a year ago the partner decided to deliver a SaaS version, which made completely sense commercially. Then the SaaS became public a month ago and we keep encountering critical issues, like features not working, translation files older than the last on-prem release, or even impossibility to log in because somebody installed a patch and never checked anything after (and never told us about it either). But this time we cannot buffer anything, so they are basically shooting themselves in the foot.

Galaxy was a very important magazine for the science fiction literature, but slightly off-topic question: is the content really supposed to be public domain? For everything published in 1950 the original copyright length was 28 years, but it was retroactively extended with the 1976 copyright act. Or is it another case of unregistered copyright, like Night of the Living Dead?

I've been part of a community of hobbyist/indy gamedev since 2002. At that that time, there were very few engines usable by hobbyists due to price constraints: - Quake 3 Engine for FPS-like. Other FPS engine were moddable, but as the source code was not available it limited the possibilities. - RPG Maker for old school JRPG - Adventure Game Studio and GameMaker for Sierra/LucasArts adventure games. I could probably include ScummVM. - Mugen (and another one I forgot the name) for VS fighting games. I certainly forget some others.

These engines being tailored-made for a specific type of game, people wanting to do something else had to create their own engine, often in C++, sometimes in Python or Lua, reinventing the wheel most of the time. The barrier for entry being so high, game designers had to team with coders, but their end-goal not being always aligned (creating the game vs learning how game engines are coded) this lead to the demise of many projects.

With Unity, a general purpose game engine became available for a very low price (in particular compared to Flash). Many game designers saw it as a way to work on prototype without needing to recruit a team of coders. And for many coders, it was a way to try their hand at game design, while being able to push the engine further using C#.

It's a bit light for a press release. Considering RedHat is officially promoting AWS on their website, providing more information to let people know whether the offering on Google Cloud will be better or similar would have been better.

Is coworking a popular thing in big japanese cities? Being a salaryman since arriving in the country I haven't had any exposure to it.

However I noticed the place where the Tokyo iOS developer meeting happens every month would be perfect for co-working: many rooms of different sizes, enabling people to set up some group meetings whenever is needed.

That's the point the article is missing. Many people currently creating HTML5 games are not motivated by money. They can be hobbyists or people familiar with JS who wants to try making a game using a language they already know. As a consequence this lead to the apparition of many game engine/frameworks/libraries just like the last few years have seen an explosion of "generalist" JS frameworks/libraries. And this explains why the last few weeks we saw many flappy birds and 2048 clones. Well, and the Flappy Game Jam probably helped regarding the formers too.

And as these types of games can be quite addictive, while using JS made them easy to share over Twitter or Facebook, no wonder they were so successful.

For the moment there is nothing indicating that these two free successes could lead to the commercial success of paid web games. At least nothing so far that would make developers migrate from native apps.

Another hobbyist here. Back when I was a late teenager I might have contemplated doing it professionally but nowadays it would not my choice. Due to discovering other domains I am interested in along the years - like animation or game design - I chose to stay as a generalist instead of dedicating myself to one these 3 domains. Consequently I am at best average in all of them, programming included. The thing is, I may not be tackling very difficult problem like optimizing an emulator or a 3D engine but I still feel some satisfaction when fixing an issue in my code and more importantly, learning from it. In fact whatever your level is there are always new things to learn, be it in your field or another one.

On a side note programming as a hobbyist gives me sufficient technical knowledge to be able to communicate with developers using their own language, which can be very useful when doing the interface between a customer and a development team for example.

Although some people are trying to participate to both, I think the Cyberpunk Game Jam could have benefited from not running partially concurrently.

*http://itch.io/jam/cyberpunk-jam

In my previous job where we developped our own PDF interpreter (neither based on Adobe owns PDF lib or Print Engine) we only needed InDesign in short occasional burst, mainly to produce test files when new PDF features were introduced, or to check some issues reported by customers. Switching to the CC model for us made sense as it saved us money.

And in my current job we only need to use Adobe applications to generate demo files for tradeshows and sometimes private demos. So, we never require a full-time license. And we can use it as an alternative to a floating license as any of us can log in to use one of the application before logging out once finished. However now that I think about it I am not sure whether our marketing team switched to the CC model or have been using CS 5 or 5.5 the whole time. Considering they use it much more often than us it would make sense if they did not use CC.