Mod parent up please.

Yet another failure of Slashdotters to research a topic before posting.

Russell L. Anderson made robots play ping pong at AT&T Bell Labs in 1988:

http://www.ieeecss.org/CSM/library/1989/feb1989/w15-21.pdf

Any engineering manager with a bit of history can tell you that the really, really, really good engineers for one highly narrow topical area -- say, for example, optimizing FFT transforms on an obscure ARM architecture variant -- tend to not be entirely normal human beings. In truth, many of what we consider to be brilliant asocial geeks are probably high-functioning autistic spectrum people.

Havok is a physics engine commonly used in video games. It was originally developed by Steven Collins while at Trinity College in Dublin.

Mod parent up +1 for truth.

"And by denying the public access to a work of art that they helped create is not within his rights, even though he owns the rights."

I'd like to mark the quoted article, this Slashdot post, and all follow-up messages as "Troll," please. The article was written specifically to be controversial and generate discussion; the article was reposted on Slashdot for the same reason; and there will be plenty of post activity on here for that reason as well.

But the honest to Jebus bottom line is that nobody gives a crap which version has Darth saying NOOOO and which one does not.

Let's get Slashdot back to reviewing Linux distros and making spurious legal arguments. Thanks very much.

Oh how the times have changed. For info about QA for Netscape 4.0, see this short refresher course:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarro_boogs

--- cut here --

The following comment is provided in the Bugzilla source code to developers who may be confused by this behaviour:
Zarro Boogs Found
This is just a goofy way of saying that there were no bugs found matching your query. When asked to explain this message, Terry Weissman (an early Bugzilla developer) had the following to say:
I've been asked to explain this ... way back when, when Netscape released version 4.0 of its browser, we had a release party. Naturally, there had been a big push to try and fix every known bug before the release. Naturally, that hadn't actually happened. (This is not unique to Netscape or to 4.0; the same thing has happened with every software project I've ever seen.) Anyway, at the release party, T-shirts were handed out that said something like "Netscape 4.0: Zarro Boogs". Just like the software, the T-shirt had no known bugs. Uh-huh. So, when you query for a list of bugs, and it gets no results, you can think of this as a friendly reminder. Of *course* there are bugs matching your query, they just aren't in the bugsystem yet...
--Terry Weissman

The information in this post is common knowledge for everyone working in production in the game industry. It's considered standard nowadays for most AAA titles to schedule and design for ten hours of non-repetitive gameplay. I suspect this is only a surprise to people who don't work in the industry.

People do not consider replayability when purchasing a game. People purchase games based on advertising, game reviews, word of mouth, and tie-ins to existing franchises. Game reviews typically only consider the first hour or so of gameplay.

There's a lot of people on this thread demanding 40+ hours of gameplay per game. The truth is that VERY FEW gamers actually play their games in this style. This is one of those cases where, as a game developer, you have to ignore what people say, and watch what they actually do.

esr's original analogy of the cathedral and the bazaar is not applicable to types of social networks. He was using the concept exclusively to describe software development models. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Unless you are capable of going into Facebook and rearranging the data tables and making your own facebook, you can't apply the concept directly here. Ergo it's a stretch to call any social network anything but a cathedral.

...as to how Google suddenly became indebted to provide these services.

The implication with these posts is that we're already dependent on Google for free calendar, email and a bunch of other stuff. And if Google suddenly cuts off those services for one reason or another, Google is bad.

I can't see how Google+ -- which is not even technically out of beta -- is a service that Google is morally required to provide to anyone. Same thing for Google's other search services.

If you're using Google's services, you're in Google's house and you should expect to play entirely by their rules. Google is far less evil than a lot of companies are.

Maybe someone can explain the logical leap between "this corporate service is/was partially free" and "I am entitled to use this service on my own terms".

God save us from programmers pretending to be economists.

Bitcoin is not a proven store of value. The tech is less than three years old. All the other stores of value have ages in millennia.

Timucua scrip is backed by world reserve currency. Bitcoin isn't.

There are people who have dedicated their lives to studying economics. You haven't. You are spamming Wikipedia links as evidence for your attempts to increase the value of Bitcoin. You are trying to make money by spreading incomplete and incorrect information. That is Evil. Stop immediately.

Jebus in a sidecar, Slashdot; do you think we've all never heard of parallel programming before? OpenMP has been around for ten years now. Yeah, you can't write a for loop in C and expect magically parallelization. Seriously, is there ANYONE here who doesn't know this already?

If you're trying to dumb down your article content to the point where it annoys any vaguely experienced programmers... well, you're succeeding.

Since scalability is a concern for your app, you probably want to architect your server around a LAMP stack. For version control use git or svn. Windows licenses get more expensive as they accept more users, whereas LAMP stacks have only the cost of maintenance.

"Going to the cloud" vs "hosting your server" is only a question of which hardware will host your machine. It's irrelevant to you right now. If you're pinching pennies it's almost always cheaper and faster to run LAMP apps on local hardware and then scale to remote hosting when you have enough users to warrant.

The nature of your question indicates that you don't know all the questions yet. I think you need a few more months of R&D before you call yourself a web startup.

Slashdot, really: we ARE real engineers, unlike the Geek Squad type places; we KNOW how to fix computers; so posting yet another article on how lesser engineers are unreliable, immoral and unable to fix problems that we're able to fix... That is basically the ongoing and constant story of our professional lives. Please, editors, keep in mind your audience when you're choosing articles for slashdot. Thank you.

Experts have determined that purchasing the most expensive chess set does not improve your ELO score. #noshitsherlock