So far I haven't been terribly impressed with Wolfram Alpha.

For example, searching for the price of oil in non-US dollars results in a US dollar timeline multiplied by the CURRENT exchange rate of that foreign currency, not in the historical timeline. It's like Alpha is having a stab at an answer, but isn't smart enough to know when it's answering the question wrong.

One of the things I immediatly noticed is the lack of build-in libraries. The reason I've always preferred Delphi and C# over C/C++ and PHP over Perl is that they all come with a comprehensive build-in function library for wide area of things.

The release of Strawberry Perl Professional in January should resolve your issues then, as we're going to be rolling a ton of stuff into a single install, so it will come with comprehensive built-in function library for a wide area of things.

Or at least, it will fix it on Windows...

I hear people complaining about their shitty IT conditions, and I really do sympathise.

I used to be in a similar situation, before I learned a bit more about Economics and applied it to job hunting.

Supply and Demand alone suggest jobs in places like the Games industry (to which most male gamers under the age of about 25 aspire) will be horrible. The massive supply of labour will be chewed up and spat out by the fickle industry, paid low money and treated like crap.

Likewise, many people in IT are on the cost side of the ledger, where a company is always going to be seeking for reductions in cost and increases in efficiency.

My suggestion? Find an industry which is old (and thus has well established work principles), deeply unsexy, and (if you can) look for jobs on the income side of the ledger. And then be the guy that steps up to take responsibility for safe-guarding that income, the guy that can step up and speak truth to power and be taken seriously because it's your job to make sure that $100m, or $1b, or $10b revenue stream never ever ever stops.

In my case, I discovered the logistics industry and found a programming job at the largest company in my country maintaining the codebase responsible for 80% of their sales (and climbing).

Good money, normal 9-5 hours, prohibited from doing overtime, a proper infra team to manage the hardware, a proper ops team to deploy and run our software, and a reasonable ability to requisition just about anything we need, because The Spice Must Flow.

I would imagine that similar jobs to mine exist in all kinds of places that sound really boring, places like power companies and garbage recycling and anywhere else that needs a lot of IT but will never be mentioned on the front page of slashdot.

The other place the money could have gone was that the government could have just sucked it all back into "General Revenue".

It's great to see that they left the money inside of the CSIRO.

What do you do?
  I'm a programmer
  Can you help fix my computer?
  I don't know anything about computers
  How is that possible?
  I just help make the internet, computers are a whole different field

It's not a secret we have it, but there is a formal promise to the Americans we absolutely won't tell anyone else how we did it.

I concur with the parent.

I work in logistics, which has about the same reputation for being boring as gambling has for being morally distasteful.

If you're configuring networks or doing desktop support or doing the same kind of work that you'd do in any other company, then that might invoke painting an industry stigma.

On the other hand, if you are doing the bits of that industry that are genuinely interesting from an engineering perspective then that's quite a different story.

My industry is boring, but there's something quite interesting about moving billions of dollars of material to 100,000s of people across a whole continent while never going down and never losing data.

Similarly, the gambling industry probably has great areas like those mentioned about. I'd throw in touch screen tech, graphics, electronics and proof-carrying software and a few other areas where experience in that area would be a positive.

And if you were actually involved in the math of the game design, massive bonus points.

Speaking as a long-time "Sidney" resident, I gotta say we were all a bit annoyed by the whole damned thing too, the fact they ripped up half the CBD, the endless news stories, the drama bombs, the wasted money, the roads that were all going to be closed, and all the general getting ready crap. People were wearing "Fuck The Olympics" shirts openly in the streets.

And then the games started.

And it was a fucking awesome enormous city wide party that lasted for 2-3 weeks, all the horrible concrete repeatedly torn up footpaths had been replaced with highly skatable and cable-friendly slate all through the centre city, there were no building sites anywhere, the pubs and bars were all full, and it just generally kicked ass.

While I don't by any means underestimate the ability of Londoners to put a negative light on something, I have this suspicion that it's the same for every city that hosts it. A sort of preparation and drama filled pregnancy, filled with hormonal outbursts and morning sickness.

Wait till the games actually start, it will be a different place.

Indeed, not to mention the rise of Brazil in the world in general (much like China before it) and the chance to finally have one in South America now there's a country competent enough to make it work. Plus the better weather, plus it's cheaper to go to, plus you don't need crazy-priced "Platinum (US Only)" grade medical and lawsuit travel insurance, plus how awesome a Brazillian opening and closing ceremony will be, plus America has had it relatively recently, and on and on.

I always thought the idea behind signatures was to evolve a way of writing your name that looking almost nothing like your name at all, but you can scribble in less than a second with a dramatic flourish? :/

R18+ is not applicable to video games, which has been an ongoing complaint of the industry for a LONG time now.

So in the sense this isn't "banned" as such, it's just that the censors are given the game and told to work out the category.

Normally, anything so bad that it doesn't fit into the R18+ classification (which usually means stuff like "realistic depictions of rape" and varying gradients of behaviour heading towards but falling short of "child pornography") are the only things that end up beyond the available ratings and in the "Refused Classification" area.

The problem is just that they WOULD quite happily give it R18+, but they aren't allowed to. Which leaves violent games like this thrown in with rape video and similar stuff, where they don't belong.

Everyone knows it's fucking ridiculous, and as the game-playing public ages I imagine it will get fixed eventually. It just results in stupid edge cases in the short term.

It's funny, but every time I see stuff like "the politics is so thick" or "there are no levels" and a dozen other things new MMOs say are amazing and novel I keep mentally adding "... like EVE Online".

I swear to god, sometimes I think EVE is becoming the Lisp of the MMO world. Lisp/EVE did it first, Lisp/EVE did that much better, every language/MMO will eventually embed a hacked up, tacked on, bad emulation of Lisp/EVE.

Oh how I wish that they had called it the Bly Sky Mine.

> Today, leaders of teams are faced with a bewildering array of choices ranging from Subversion to the more popular Git and Mercurial.

I think you might be confusing Internet "buzz" with popularity.

It's that when game designers come up with ideas like "And then we'll unlock him to everyone, and they'll all hunt him blah blah blah" (where designers try to intentionally create spontaneity) is that it USUALLY fails to take into account cycles of adaptation.

If someone has managed to become the number one bad-ass on the server, is it really worth going after them when they almost certainly did it specifically to attract people into a trap/gank?