Yes depression is real. Yes people have chemical imbalances or are wired the wrong way. Yes some people are born into shitboxs with terrible life circumstances. Yes some people lose their fortunes taking a crap-shoot gamble on flaky or even sure-fire premises. Depression is complex. It could be sourced from professional failure, home-life problems, neurological imbalances, marital issues. Man the fuck up and face your emotions head on. Or take drugs if your brain doesn't allow you to cope that way. Or just talk to somebody about it and let it all out. Venting is helpful too. Depression is real. Sometimes it is overdiagnosed. Sometimes it is missed in people. There are many coping mechanisms. I'm making generalizations but all in all depression is not a binary state, but a spectrum. This is not news for nerds, but it is stuff that matters, particularly if the rates of depressions are on the rise, rates which could be indicative of the socio-economic status of a populations inhabitants, and perhaps about the greater culture as well. I am a software developer and have no professional qualifications to comment on the matter, but since this is the internet, fuck-all lets give it a go!

I'm not defending these companies, but in internet time we'll all be floating heads in jars connected to the singularity hyperspace flux capacitor continuum gravimatrix in 20 years.

Ditto, great book. Just loaned it out to my director and he liked it too. Highly recommend it if you're interested in the rise and fall of societies due to internal and external pressures.

Either your manager is an idiot or you are misinterpreting his analogy. The business entity that causes the defects pays for the defects if they are within the terms of the contract. The builder is a business entity (S Corp or LLC, etc), just as much as XYZ Co. selling Desktop Bullshit 5. The employees of the business are generally shielded from mistakes the business makes. This is not unique to software development. A flaw in a Boeing 777 does not come out of the paychecks of the engineers that built it. They are either fired/retrained/retained for the re-engineering project, management is fired (or today promoted), or contracts are dropped/re-worked, and the work is redone on company/business entity dime. The same company that built it will be the same company that pays for fixes.

If I paint 'ole Ms. Gladys fence and miss a post, going back and "doing it on my own time" is trivial in terms of time-cost. But if my corporation writes an enterprise HR system for managing her egregious cat collection, it is my corporation that will fund the bug fixes for an erroneous bug that miscounts turds per feline. That cost of doing business will come out of my corporation's margin, not my employees paychecks.

In enterprise environments there are SLAs that cover this sort of thing. Why is this drivel on the front page? Somebody's first time discovering they can email scripts for their Joe's Home Programming business or is the editor-community here (he said sighing...) that detached from how enterprise development works?

Though I can empathize with the spirit of your post, the technological landscape is still driven by supply and demand now just as it was back then. It's just now there are more people than ever beginning to realize what is possible with technology, so the demand ebbs and flows in a more diverse manner than when only a select few of intellectuals understood what could be done.

You should be thankful; though the signal-to-noise ratio is fairly low in terms of groundbreaking devices vs. hipster trash, the magnitude of the signal itself is still larger than in any previous decade previously and you can still get more amazing hardware+software that is practical and outstanding.

If you watch a lot of television and consume any amount of mainstream tripe, then I could see one's opinion being jaundiced. You have to see the forest through the trees man!

Somebody please make a self-destruct system like in mission impossible that explodes during first wearing.

To hell with 7. Please put Windows 8 on the ATMs instead! I already love how ATMs do a wonderful job of selecting the wrong option for me after finally getting the card to take, only to then take me into the Spanish menu, spitting out a receipt, and then not accepting my card again while the line forms behind me! Metro can only enhance this lovely experience! Hell, add a kinect to it so when I flip it a golden salute it recognizes my input and doubles the ATM fee! Gotta keep up with the bank's great customer service these days!

http://xkcd.com/1279/

The line from the video "All so the big shots could save a buck and maybe buy a new summer home" was probably the catalyst, not the special effects. How could this guy be dumbfounded -- what do you expect reactionary corporate America to do when you satirize their modus operandi! Hello Streisand...

Tinfoil hat time! So in 40 years, these will be required by insurers to screen for pre-existing conditions!?!!? No historical data on early-stage developmental physiology, no 95% subsidy off government single-payer coverage cost...

And ... ?

mod parent up

I booted up a few of my fairly recent FPS purchases last night for PC just to get a sense of where the community is at. CS:S, BF2, BF3, BFBC2, TF2, Q3A, CoD (x), L4D(1-2), etc all still strong. The thing about it is, there are so many decade old shooters that just wont die. I can still play CS 1.6 and will prefer it to any new Call of Duty. But why? Is it a comfort thing? Nostalgia for a past era? Simplicity? Muscle memory? Surely some of that.

The new games are still fun, but they feel 'tinny', or less substantive than I'd come to expect for millions of ducats dumped in to a piece of software. With many modern shooters, I feel like they are evolving into a caricature of what a decent shooter would be.

Also, I think as the PC gaming generation gets older fewer newbies (In all due respect of course!) back-fill our ranks. I hope I'm wrong. Anybody got stats on our rate of attrition? LMGTFY yada yada ..

First world problems.

In this modern day patents simply protect firms from competition.