Is a shitty game where you go into a school to shoot kids trolling, or not trolling?

Like, them defining what they mean by that would help.

So, phones in the US generally have a lifespan of about two years, as that's what carriers subsidize. (After two years, you can just get a new phone.)

Which means operating systems running on those phones generally have a two-year outlook.

Hardware older than two years running a mobile OS... isn't as competitive as new hardware running the same mobile OS.

Google put out hardware, and let it sit for more than two years without a replacement. And usually didn't drop their price much after the first year, either.

So they wound up repeatedly selling tablets slower than Apple's, running an OS and apps that really weren't tweaked for them.

The experience of a Google-branded Android tablet was flawless for the first year, so-so for the second, and then left you wondering when the hell they'd announce a replacement. Again. And again. While friends with iPads had longer-term OS support by default, and new hardware was available Every Year if you were willing to part with the loot.

I finally gave up last year. I miss the apps on that side, though.

Okay, that honestly makes my damn day.

Okay, I <3 Tom, but it's worth picking out this bit:

"you may remember him from previous efforts to teach an AI how to play NES games"

And point out that that *may* have been a joke. Where he explained part of it in a Youtube video wearing a colander on his head. If he later actually made the joke work, that's terrific, but holy shit, submissions to SIGBovik aren't, uh, real?

Google Search has been maybe ten thousand people working for more than a decade, and they're largely solid engineers.

I'm... guessing Stuxnet isn't within many orders of magnitude of that effort.

This. Making things 10x more precise comes with a lot of cost, and without clear gain.

Toyota makes crazy-reliable things. They design for parts to have a certain set of tolerance, and when they get to tolerance that it was designed to work with, it holds up to kids spilling things on it, people driving them as taxi cabs, and every imaginable type of weather. And they work and work well for hundreds of thousands of miles.

10x more tolerance... may not be worth it, or will likely cost a lot more than it brings back.

It's incredibly useful to keep in touch with people, figure out what's going on this weekend, and rant about politics?

Also, considering Blind a reasonable sample of the tech industry is... well, has anyone else used that? It's, uh, odd.

Would you rather have ads in your content or cryptocoin miners running in the background?

Assuming content costs money, both seem ways of making money on pages with content.

That said, it might make sense to limit the amount of the CPU that the browser can use; if we're designing webpages that need >1ghz octo-core processors, we're already doing something probably pretty wrong.

I'm 40, but have already given my employer a 3-5 year heads up on retirement. (I'm lucky, and have a lot of focus on that goal.)

It's changed the dynamic, where high-stress things land on my lap at work far less often now. Since they know I could leave now... I get slightly better treatment, at least in those edge cases that would normally make me like my job less.

If you think your employer might let you go for giving them advance notice, stay quiet.
If you think there's no chance they'd let you go early, tell them now.
Otherwise, it took them six months to find *you*, so give them six months notice, and you've minimized risk while retiring with a clean conscience.

I have a Fitbit Alta. It's not ugly as sin, and it's not trying to fake looking like a traditional watch, either.

But it *does* pair with my Android phone to auto-unlock the phone when I'm around. The battery lasts a few days without a recharge. And again, it doesn't look god-fucking-awful, which is good for a watch, as they've been fashion accessories for years, so selling tacky-as-shit ones isn't really moving much product.

My Android (Nexus 5) is a tank; I regularly go a few weeks before bothering to reboot, and the reboot is because I let the battery die. (Battery life is 18-24 hours.) My wife's MotoX (the original one) is just about the same, except the battery life is better (presumably because it's a smaller screen?) 24+ hours.

Unless you have the world's most amazing fire safe or root cellar, you have three options that I see. First, easy: pick a drive that survives to zero degrees fahrenheit, and when you're not using it, put it in the freezer in your kitchen or garage. Most fires will kill it, but you'll get a bit more protection. Second, harder: pick a small drive, like a USB Key. Write it once a month or so. Store it in a safety deposit box at the bank, where only you have access. Storing something *in* your house that needs to be fireproof is nigh impossible. Storing it somewhere externally that's easily accessed and still secure is a problem you can solve with cash. Third, actually pretty trivial. Store it to *two* cloud providers, so if one goes out of business, you still have your data. Google Drive and Dropbox, for example. One trick; encrypt it locally before ever uploading it. Winzip (or Linux's zip) should both be able to produce and use strong AES-256 keys. Currently, the expected amount of time to get 50% odds of breaking AES-256 is exponentially more computers than currently exist running for the entire life of the universe, using suns as fuel. (With brute force, no one can do it, ever.) So the "someone will hack me" is up to you. The "two cloud providers" is probably what you want.

If you're looking to get a software job, but can't get the interview, one thing that enormously helps is writing code for open source projects, or having sufficiently complex project work that you built yourself available to see online. If someone can read a short link on your resume, and then go see your actual code, you become *much* less of a wildcard and much more of a known quality; they then know you can do the job, if the code matches up well enough.

Alternatively, if you've done automated test scripts, look for QA Analyst positions as a bridge into most tech organizations.

What's your academic background? And are you located near a large city, and/or a tech hub?

Your scale implies one set of skills, and there's certainly more than that! As two important ones; the ability and desire to learn, and the tools you already know. I've worked with a lot of junior engineers who didn't know much, but were good at picking things up and moving with them. I've worked with a lot of senior engineers who knew lots of tools and theory, but weren't very good at picking up new things. (I've also worked with junior engineers who were terrible, and senior engineers who could pick up new things faster than me; it's a mix.) To get hired, you need to convince the hiring manager you can do the job, can do it better than the next guy, and can do it at a price they're willing to pay. Right now, there's simply not enough developers who can do the job, so even if you're not great but still get the job done and don't seem awful to work with, the determining factor is "did someone else better apply?"

Always go to lunch with coworkers, and chat with them about... anything, or just hang out while they chat if you can join a group doing so. If they want to talk work, ask them what they're working on; if something in what they say is actually interesting to you, ask 'em about it. If they don't want to talk work, where do they live? Where did they go to school? What do they think of both? What did they do this week? Ideally, they want to talk work at least part of the time, as that's likely more useful. :-) At lunch, if you find yourself talking more than a fair share, work on talking less. If you find yourself talking not at all, work on talking slightly more.