Bingo! You nailed it exactly. No sense of morals or social obligation. Just does whatever comes to his little mind and thinks he is the most clever thing since the last shitstain to come along and think he know more about tech than everyone else. What he fails to understand is that the people that created all this stuff we use knew how to do all this evil stuff, they just had better guiding values. Heck, they had guiding values period!
That's sad. I am a respectful cyclist, obey signals and signs and such. But it is the cars, who see ALL bikers as a menace, that pushed me off the road. So while you are right about a large number of cyclists behaving irresponibly, that guy on the bike you just fucked with, well, that was me and I was just commuting to work and believe in the laws as much as you do. At least I did until you did that. Now I'm afraid for my safety and more willing to break laws to keep myself safe.
You are escalating the situation instead of growing up and acting the adult, even when tons of people aren't. But I suppose "everyone else is doing it" is justification enough for you.
When the patent trolls come out, start the sniffing their torrent traffic. I'd almost bet one of the Personal Blah Blah Blah company's employees has downloaded copyrighted content from torrents. Maybe they did at home. All it takes is catching one of them and the company's argument is damaged. True, not really a proper legal thing to do, but in this case, I think a bit of creative hacking for those of us who actually care about these kinds of things would be nice. Not that I am advocating anything illegal...
I've been using a standing desk for over 5 years now and would never go back. I can go for hours on end without problems now. It also makes it easier to stretch and move around, which is more healthy. For me it was the only answer after watching my mid-section deteriorate from sitting for hours daily.
which is a different thing than having single sign-on. I personally like the following approach to reducing the number of passwords, especially for throw-away or low-concern sites.
http://rip-van-webble.blogspot.com/2012/06/using-asymmetric-keys-for-web-joinlogin.html
It depends on HTML5 local storage and uses asymmetric keys for doing the join and subsequent login. While I wouldn't necessarily jump to this for a financial website, for things like slashdot, facebook, news websites, etc., it would be a boon.
--kev
The thing I wonder about though, is the app size. Now that could be a bunch of artwork not being used, but the iPhone app I wrote (Phresheez, a tracking app) is a UIWebView with a few other view controllers and views, is around 750K in size, with the required retina artwork (of which there isn't a lot). So why should the FB be so large if not for overall sloppy design and implementation? At any rate, I think the whole thing smacks of publicity scrounging to let people know the iPhone experience "won't suck much longer". The excuses for the slowness are meager and not even really relevant to the discussion. Does it matter why it is slow, just that it is and they should fix it.
You can be in control of your caching behavior on iOS. There are delegate methods that let you hook into the HTTP process for doing a variety of interesting thing, including managing your own client-side cache.
The UIWebView on the iPhone is plenty snappy enough.
I venture to say their network communications layer is poorly implemented. The app is a memory pig. The app is a battery pig. It is 10.5 MB for what? A portal to browse the FB website. Seems way over-engineered to be that big and have a little functionality as it does.
And I suppose I could plug
if you are curious how an animated shot is broken down. It will focus more on the story aspect of breaking down the shot, but you should also get some insight on tools and other processes, especially if you watch the details. Of course this is assuming you are somewhere in the Bay Area. You should also do some web searching for "visual fx shot breakdown". That should return lots of articles describing (at a high-level), the assembly of a single VFX or CG shot. The challenge is making hundreds of those all at once and the explosion of data that goes along with that.
Also, check LinkedIn for various visual effects and pipeline groups (careful with 'pipeline', still lots of oil and gas going on out there!). They have a lot of noise often, but it will give you a flavor of what companies are looking for skill-wise, where the jobs are, etc.
I do. I've worked on VFX, CG and games for just over 15 years now. I ended up in the industry because of my knowledge of Perl (back in 1997). Yeah, go figure. As a skilled software engineer, however, I was a rare commodity at the time since I was willing to play in the realm of data modeling, databases, asset management, systems engineering, etc. Basically not the sexy stuff like writing a renderer. More building the machine to run the renderer on millions of frames of a movie. 'Natch.
It would seem to be a competitive field, but honestly, most of the resumes I've seen have not been very impressive. We have a hard time finding motivated, skilled candidates. People think it is all about CG and 3D. That is a small, important part. But by no means the end of it. If you have the chops (and you know if you do, confidence is a big part of this), then get your resume out there. (As a side note, get an English major, e.g, an excellent tech writer, to proofread your resume. Make it look nice and organized. Nothing turns me off more than a poorly organized resume. Find a good resume and emulate it).
You can target the usual suspects. Dreamworks, Pixar, Digital Domain, Weta, and EA. Stay through the credits of any CG or heavy VFX movie and you'll see all the names of all the companies you should be investigating. Check out Autodesk, The Foundry, PipelineFX, and other companies that write software for the CG industry.
Did I mention staying through the credits? I'm saying it again. You've seen the movie, honor the people who worked on it that you didn't spend the last couple hours seeing directly on the screen. It is not often in our world we can see how an individual contributed to a larger work in such a direct fashion.
As for spotlight tech, knowing Python is key. It is used by major tools in the industry like Maya, Nuke, and Katana. If you don't know it, learn it. It is also very helpful to know Linux (yes, command-line Linux). Learn all about queuing systems. Know your C and C++ (interfacing with third-party libraries from within Python can be highly useful).
Go to SIGGRAPH. It is in LA this year. I won't be going myself, but it is always a great networking opportunity. Attend interesting talks. Stay after and talk to the speakers. Ask interesting questions. Listen well. You might even get invited out to a dinner or a party. Do it. Listen more.
It will be all worth for the first time you see yourself credited on-screen. I still get all giddy when I think of Antz and my first movie credit as "TD Tools Programmer". So watch Antz, find that credit, and you'll know who I am... (No cheating using IMDB, really, go watch the movie).
More and more simulations are happening in VFX and CG animation. Cloth, hair, smoke, fire, water, etc. all require simulation on top of or in addition to the hand animation you see. The data are getting larger every year and the management of the tech to produce these things is highly complex. I love this playground and the only ethical dilemma I face is the crappy movies Hollywood has a tendency to put out.
I can safely say they have the best customer service of any company I've dealt with in the past 10 years.
Love them, love them, love them, love them. Can't imagine the internet without them. I was never happier than the day I ditched Speakeasy (then owned by Best Buy) and got Sonic.net.
I would ditch my shit-tastic DirecTV box in a second for an Apple TV. I've wanted a Tivo version of my HD DirecTV box for years, but I'm now tired of waiting and could care less. My only holdback at this point is how to get HBO legally without a satellite of cable subscription. No, I won't pirate the content. I want to legally support the things I find entertaining.
MS writes crappy software. Next story please.
I'd go after things like Perforce and other content management systems. Heck, hack Perforce alone and you could potentially get access to hundreds of companies in Silicon Valley, including a few major CG animation studios, once your hacked version of Perforce has been installed.
This is one reason I rather prefer open source software. I suppose you could hack Subversion, but if you aren't part of the core maintainers, then I don't see it sticking.
the problem is that we continue to give licenses to pilot multi-thousand pound vehicles at high-speeds to practically anyone who applies. Why this guy doesn't loose his license forever is beyond me. Driving is a privilege. How about we start treating it that way instead of something any idiot can do.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan
