v21

Hey, actually I moved so I could walk into work every morning. It takes me 20 minutes.

The usefulness of each movement isn't that they're right in themselves. It's that when the hype has faded, and they wash out again, the landscape they leave is different. If they're successful, half of what they advocated is seen as hyperbole, and half of it is taken as common sense.

And that's the case in large part because your environment is optimized for driving. For me to get a car, I'd have to pay a fair bit more in rent to have somewhere to park, and I still wouldn't be able to drive to work (there's nowhere to park). And even if I could I'd have to pay £9 a day to enter the city. (Congestion charge zone, in London). But all of central, and lots of not-so-central London is within an hour's tube ride. And as far as cycling goes, there's a lot within a 60 minutes cycling radius from here.

Of course, housing prices are atrocious, but that's an entirely separate discussion.

They do mention it's only used for deciding salary adjustments. But generally, good points. What would you do instead?

For me the most impressive part is where they list things that Valve sucks at. How many companies have a list like that?

Because the expectations jobs have come in large part form the cultural expectations prevalent within the field. And your job's expectations can make you either unhappy or unemployed.

Work can't satisfy everything. I enjoy making useless things, sometimes! I enjoy owning a project entirely. I enjoy helping friends. It's okay those itches aren't scratched by work, because work pays me.

I agree with all of this, but also want to note that as a backer, your risk is significantly smaller than that of a VC.

I used to work support for a SMS aggregator. The core business was delivering texts to mobile networks. Mobile networks break all the time, it turns out. And can't really be replaced - there's only one T-Mobile.

Now, when they died or sent garbage, our software wouldn't crash. But our service would stop functioning. And alarms would go off, and we would have to confirm why, and call them, and ask them if they knew if it had stopped working and why.

(The follow up was indeed to always ask to be added to the mailing list that would let us know this ahead of time. These proved remarkably unhelpful. In once case, we ended up setting up having to set up a mobile number to receive SMS alerts - this was apparently the only way they would notify anyone?)

And reasonably often actual engineers would be needed to be woken up. And in several cases, change the parsing behaviour so we could handle sudden unexpected changes in the format they returned. Yes, in the middle of the night.

Our system wasn't perfect, but I'm not sure our problem was simply a lack of system or unit tests.

During the day, we largely dealt with more minor customer complaints, and ongoing maintenance, outages and other nonsense fromt he carriers. Engineers would often have to dig into these edge cases too, and there was a nominated maintainer to look at this stuff, to let the rest of the team add features and work on long term fixes. But sometimes you just need someone to wedge LargeCustomer's encoding settings because they can't figure out how to properly specify it on their end.

Minecraft needed to be made of blocks, it's true. But Minecraft could be more beautiful than it is. Which isn't to diss it - what it does well, it does really well. And it can often be beautiful -- the terrain generator can produce some wonderful things.

While it isn't aiming for all the same points, and is obviously inspired in some parts by Minecraft, I think for example Cube World is a much better looking game. http://wollay.blogspot.co.uk/

If you're releasing frequently, which you probably want to be, then that's a lot of weekends you've just ruined.

Notch weighs in : https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/186359914657091585

Sounds like he's well shot of them.

And this seems bizarre behaviour on OMGPOP's part - he was entirely complimentary to OMGPOP and he publicly disclaimed credit for Draw Something. Even if you did hate him and the press he stirred up, the best way to make it go away is to completely ignore it. Why on Earth would you make this the story?

The thing to realize is that the Javascript isn't Javascript. It just looks like it. Writing good Unityscript/Javascript is going to be only syntactically different from writing C# anyway. Unityscript/Javascript is well made, but there's a few edge cases that you'll only encounter once you've already written most of the project. And mixing the two languages is messy and limited.

For C# dev, it depends how hardcore you're going to be getting. Ultimately, you normally going to be scripting, not programming. getting familiar with the Unity3D API is of more use than learning high level features of C#. For instance, while C# is object oriented, >90% of the things you write will inherit from MonoBehaviour, and most of the rest are just fancy structs.

And I code on an iMac -- I use Unity natively, and the version of MonoDevelop it ships with. It works nicely!

Not quite true -- tweets can include in_reply_to metadata, indicating the last tweet responded to, and location metadata, indicating where the tweet was sent. And of course, the account that sent the tweet is metadata, and so is the time it was sent.

And for my money, the reason they wrap every link through t.co is because this way they have analytics on every link clicked on Twitter. That sounds pretty valuable to me.

I'm sure Mozilla feels very precarious getting such a huge chunk of money from a single source. But:

- Mozilla isn't a company, it's a non-profit (this deal was done by Mozilla Corp, yes, but that's a wholly owned branch of the foundation). Reducing their reliance on Google for cash is never going to be Mozilla's aim as a whole.

- Three years is a hell of a long time. When the last deal was negotiated, there was no Bing, and no Chrome. The world was a very different place. No matter how good their strategy is, it's going to be a terrible one for the world in 3 years time.

- The interests of the Mozilla foundation and Google are broadly aligned - they both care about an open, free web. That's a rare thing to find in large industry players these days.

Yeah, just shows me a full page ad for the iPad app, and tells me their content is now exclusive to their app.

Would be interested to know what causes it to vary...

But yes, a touch of irony there.

Yeah, the process for band posters is : recognise a band (or in this case, maybe a genre). If so, then check the details. That's all the poster needs to convey, and the most important way for it to do it is by being cool and by appealing to fans of that band/genre/club night/promoter/whatever.

The thing for me isn't that you'll necessarily climb the ranks as a result of this - but that any job you can automate away is a bloody boring job to do. Even if you don't automatically take on new responsibilities as a result, your job now has less boring bits in, so it's still a win.

For an example of someone doing this all the way at the top of the corporate hierarchy, look to Ricardo Semler. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

> It was a brilliant tactical maneuver. First, it delayed discussions while members of the august Judiciary committee wrangled with how to handle this unusual conversational detour. Second, it put SOPA-supporting chairman Lamar Smith, a conservative Republican whose district is largely Texas Hill Country, on the defensive by appearing to show him siding with the intellectual-property rights of people who create triple-X movies.

> Third--and this may have been the point of the entire exercise--it gave Polis an excuse to insert the full lyrics of the popular Internet meme "The Internet is for Porn" into the official congressional hearing record for SOPA. (Representative excerpt: "All these guys unzip their flies / For porn, porn, porn!")

> Because the amendment goes further than obscenity and encompasses "pornography," it could have imperiled the remainder of SOPA. U.S. courts have ruled that pornography is not a legal term of art and is presumptively protected by the First Amendment. > Polis' amendment, in other words, could doom SOPA on constitutional grounds: which "R" rated movies would be pornographic? How about Maxim? Explicit rap lyrics? More to the point, which MPAA and RIAA member companies might have to worry about their products being deemed "pornographic?"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57344507-281/internet-is-f...

I bet The Guardian is looking very closely at this - they have been losing money for years, and they're going "digital first" too. Let's hope it works out as well for them.

Nothing would be better for the educational community than for there to be a much larger community making cheap extensions, how-to guides, tutorials and libraries for it.

Yeah, Mario Kart is infamous for it's rubber banding. It's possibly a case study in going too far - it's prominent to the point that almost all players notice it. And it's frustrating to get spammed with blue shells when you're in the lead and not be able to do anything about it. Ideally, as the article says, you'd never notice.

I can actually understand this. If you're running an awards ceremony, then the payback from the winner of the competition is relatively low - hopefully they go on to great things, and you helped them along, and establish your reputation that way. But the costs of having 10x as many entrants is pretty high - each of those entries has to be evaluated, hopefully by multiple people. Each entrant is another contact to be managed, another bit of IP to keep track of. The most important role of the fee is to reduce the number of entrants without reducing the number of genuinely awesome entrants. That's why Sundance's entry fee is so low - it makes it a reasonably expensive whim, but if you're honestly got a shot, it's obviously worth doing. It still sucks, but it's for sensible reasons, and not just for the actual revenue stream.

[Edited to add: But if anyone is charging more than a nominal fee, run away!]

Yes, but there's a prior prediction from theory that the Higgs will be within this energy band.

Why on earth would they show them off? All they'll do is scare competitors - the people who'd buy white label Amazon stuff will find it when they search for "HDMI cable" and click on the cheapest option. I mean, it's clearly inevitable (I'm sure serious competitors in the spaces they're entering with their white label products are aware of them), but why hasten that day?

At the London Hackspace, there's a saying that gets used a lot. When someone has describes a great idea for improving the space, some excellent idea for how to categorize the book sin the library or whatever, the stock response is "Great! Well volunteered!". It's to the point that there have been posts to the mailing list consisting of only the letters "wv".

And that's an excellent way to think, and I find it seeping into the rest of my life. If you decide something should be done, the vast majority of the time, if you put effort into it, if you take responsibility for it, it can be done. There's not many bars to achievement once you decide to do that. In a startup environment, there are so many things that need solving, that are crying out for people to take responsibility for them. The only way they'll get done is if you decide it's you that'll do them, not if you assign them elsewhere.

The headline says "Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+", but actually most of these features are about making your Google+ experience better, not your gmail experience better. In other words, this smells more of corporate policy than product improvement.

But that Paypal does this shit has been a hardy perennial new story for years now. Competitors are coming, slowly, from different directions, but it's not clear that Paypal is actually much damaged by these stories.