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Comment Re:And yet (Score 1) 287

by rikkitikki (#28159901) Attached to: How American Homeless Stay Wired

I knew a guy who was a Physicist. Government cancelled the program he was working on. It was highly classified, so he couldn't put his work experience on a resumé. He decided to take classes at a local community college and got a job delivering pizzas. He eventually got his degree in Computer Science and came to work with us at Kennedy Space Center.

Smart guy. And I really respect how he took a job he normally wouldn't do in order to help re-educate himself in a new field.

Comment Re:Windows Only (Score 5, Interesting) 381

by rikkitikki (#28046819) Attached to: Google Releases Chrome V2.0

I used to ask the same question. I now work for a small startup. Most of us develop on Linux, a couple on Windows, and a couple on Mac. If we could afford to do a linux-only version, we would. But in order to have any kind of marketshare on the desktop, we need to output a Windows version.

The mac and linux versions mostly "just work" and simply need testing. But about a month before release, the entire team needs to stop what they're doing and get the Windows version fully working and tested. Windows development is a resource hog (in terms of people). In some ways, Windows is just different, but it seems in many ways, Windows is deliberately incompatable with anything else at the source code level. Windows makes it as difficult as possible to be cross-platform.

As a result, we get the Windows version out and working before we have time to test the Linux and Mac versions. It kinda sucks to spend that much time and resources on a Windows version. It's either that, or re-route our development resources to Windows-only and ignore the other platforms. Of course, we don't want to do that.

Comment Re:The difference bewteen memcpy() and strcpy() (Score 1) 486

by rikkitikki (#27968005) Attached to: Microsoft To Banish Memcpy()

Either Microsoft is really stupid or really evil. Along with declaring printf(), et. al. "not portable, use _printf() instead", we should now use memcpy_s(). Let me go see where that is defined in the C standard. Oh, that's right, it isn't. It's only on Microsoft platforms.

So, what's going on here? Make up your own function (not in the C standard) to replace memcpy() and tell people to use that rather than memmove() (which is in the C standard). What the hell is the motivation here?
Data Storage

Surveying the World of the Biggest Server Farms 106

Posted by timothy from the don't-forget-the-various-tlas dept.
1sockchuck writes "Rackspace said this week that it is managing more than 50,000 web servers, raising the question: who else has that many? Of companies that publicly discuss their server counts, there are only a handful that are near or above the 50,000 server mark, including 1&1 Internet, The Planet, and Akamai, as well as Rackspace. The larger totals are found among companies that don't discuss how many servers they're running. The leading suspects: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay."
Games

Speaking With the Devs Behind a 7-Year Game Mod Project 100

Posted by Soulskill from the i-don't-even-remember-where-i-lived-7-years-ago dept.
Gamasutra has an interview with members of Off Topic Productions, the team behind the recent completion of The Nameless Mod, a Deus Ex modification that was in development for seven years. They talk about how they stayed interested in such a lengthy, unpaid project, and also how their vision for the mod shifted over the years as a result of experience and feedback. "We estimate that we recreated everything we did during the first 2 or so years because we got better. The plot went through 4 revisions in the first year and was continually tweaked, expanded, and revised. Most of it also simply came about as we experimented with the game and the engine and grew familiar with what we could do — originally we were planning something even more open and free-form than we ended up with, but when we realized how fundamentally the game was built for a completely different type of structure, we reigned ourselves in and adjusted our design. ... Also, I don't know if you ever go back and read what you wrote 6-7 years ago, but in my experience that's a great way to embarrass yourself — I spent a lot of time rewriting old dialogue to be less embarrassing."

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