rdw

25 ms·

181.
by rdw 14y ago
The point of a metaphor is that it helps you make guesses about the behavior of something you don't yet understand by extrapolating from something you do understand. If there's no extrapolation possible, then it's lost its power. At that
182.
by rdw 14y ago
Do you have evidence that talent can be linearized in such a manner that it is possible to tell objectively within 1% how well an intern will fit at the company? Of course you can linearize on test scores or number of publications or somet
183.
by rdw 14y ago
Mathematical notation is not readable, no. It requires extensive training to be able to understand it, and even experts will take quite a while to comprehend a document they are not already mostly familiar with. It is not like you cross s
184.
by rdw 14y ago
It's like the article-writing style at The Onion: the (amazing) headline comes first, and the actual content, if any, comes after.
185.
by rdw 14y ago
Because of the short timeframe of the project we did all sorts of horrible things (like develop everything in the Windows platform code rather than split off a new NaCl platform directory). Getting it to the point of integrating cleanly me
186.
by rdw 14y ago
Glad to see this post! As lead developer on the initial port of Bastion to MonoGame, I was very interested in that work being open-sourced eventually. The game industry in general doesn't have a very good understanding of open source conc
187.
by rdw 14y ago
If you're an experienced developer, but the project you join requires a different toolset and/or set of executables than a previous one, then it'll take you a good while to get up to speed on it. E.g. you've got Visual Studio the way you li
188.
by rdw 14y ago
Completely agreed that getting it out the door is the real core problem. However, there seems to be a meme that PHP is somehow a panacea for getting things out the door, as if suddenly upon picking up the PHP shovel, the programmer realize
189.
by rdw 14y ago
I worked on a game that had 2 months scheduled for "getting through cert", out of maybe 10 total. And this was for a title that was a sequel, on an engine that had gone through cert dozens of times.
190.
by rdw 14y ago
Nice roundup. I recently used CMake for a modestly-sized project. After getting over the initial hump, I've found it to be quite pleasant (the documentation could be a lot better, though). I find the ability to generate real projects for
191.
by rdw 14y ago
Sounds like the energy is bound into the material during its formation: "there is an internal latent strain between the building blocks that constrains the overall shape".
192.
by rdw 14y ago
The advice to run your wifi router unencrypted is not right. Too much of a security risk, too much chance of abuse in a city. It may reduce the chance of successful prosecution of copyright infringement, but it seems like it opens you to
193.
by rdw 14y ago
It's impossible to conclude from the evidence presented that the antitrust action had no effect on the breaking down of Microsoft's monopoly. It's entirely plausible that the enforcement left them unable to respond as quickly to new market
194.
by rdw 14y ago
It's amazing to me how often people get tripped up on the behavior of colonial insects like bees and ants. Because all reproduction is done by a queen, it makes little sense in most circumstances to think about the sterile workers as indiv
195.
by rdw 14y ago
Copyright 1985 Mojang. No detail too small.
196.
by rdw 14y ago
One of the things that I've seen bother people is that the source code ends up in a directory named PROJNAME/PROJNAME. Once you understand how the module system works in Python, it makes sense that things are this way, but it can be kind o
197.
by rdw 15y ago
Great move. I am reminded of Apple's recent Java update[1], which turns Java off by default, and disables it again after a period of disuse. It moves the security threat into phishing rather than drive-by territory, a definite improvement
198.
by rdw 15y ago
Come on, the site is horribly broken in multiple obvious ways. No one gets a break for that. I have to report that I tried to mess around with the AGL example and got a perpetual loading screen. The concept seems good; the execution, lack
199.
by rdw 15y ago
Am I misunderstanding, or does this still have a single point of failure at the gateway machine?
200.
by rdw 15y ago
Adobe has released a FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/premium-fea... Unity's export to Flash does currently require both 3D and memory-optimization technologies. Any Unity-Flash game that has a chance of netting $50k
201.
by rdw 15y ago
At GDC this year there was a lot of talk about using the planned Unity3D-to-Flash feature. At this point, the only advantage Flash has over Unity is that more people have the Flash plugin than the Unity plugin. I think a lot of game devel
202.
by rdw 15y ago
I think it's pretty clear that they will use some sort of signing process to validate swfs, and in some respects it'll be pretty similar to DRM. In the original announcement, they say, "When the premium features licensing terms go into effe
203.
by rdw 15y ago
In all my messing around it did not occur to me to try that. Thanks! Solution blinders in action! I suppose a little animation would have gone a long way towards clearing that up initially. Even doing it correctly, I still feel it's a lit
204.
by rdw 15y ago
For a drawing app, feel and responsiveness are incredibly critical, with features being a distant second. These qualities are essentially impossible to convey without trying it out. I feel it's actually more respectful of the user's time t
205.
by rdw 15y ago
I had incredible difficulty with the rewind/undo interface. Almost as often as I bring up the rewind UI, it'll do some other action instead, like drawing little dots, or zooming in/out, or bringing up/dismissing the tools palette. When the
206.
by rdw 15y ago
It bugs me that we haven't moved past "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations" in these discussions. It's an extreme strawman. No one -- not Graham, not Richard Stallman, not Julian Assange -- is interested in m
207.
by rdw 15y ago
Second Life involves a lot of per-user message sending. IM, group chats, friend requests, marriage proposals, dialogs with in-game merchant systems, payment notifications, persistent announcements, and a lot that I'm forgetting. They're a
208.
by rdw 15y ago
No out-of-the-box solution was used. The system remained a menagerie of different messaging techniques (database, udp, in-memory storage), and the company just spent time improving the reliability and performance of these existing systems
209.
by rdw 15y ago
I'm the primary author (formerly Which Linden). Surprised to see this pop up here after all this time! We wrote this almost three years ago, and at the time ZeroMQ was substantially less mature than it is now. In particular, the Python bi
210.
by rdw 15y ago
I read The Reg ten years ago; spelling errors and screwups of all kinds were completely standard.

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