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Comment Re:AI has great chances (Score 2) 89

It's my impression that pro players often get amateur players through bet sizing, if your call/fold response doesn't match the equity of your hand they'll pretty easily see that they can milk you for value or push you into folding. Or that the amateurs are bad at getting the maximum value out of their good hands because they give the pros easy call/fold odds. Of course there's a lot more to bet sizing than your own two cards, but you can't bluff properly without having a pretty good clue about what you represent having and making credible bets as if you had those cards. Pros are pretty good at smelling stories that don't make sense where you're betting on the turn/river like you have cards that you'd never play that way preflop/on the flop because they're usually a bluff. Or a very well disguised hand, but they'll sure test if you're capable of that.

Comment Re:File manager without file, edit, view.. (Score 2) 442

Lol, angry gnussolini nerd. And the rest of the world with brains keeps not caring and happily uses Unity and Gnome-shell.

The rest of the world uses Windows and OS X on the desktop, Android and iOS on mobile and couldn't care less about Unity and Gnome-shell. Even Windows Vista got Linux beat on StatCounter. You can use the classic desktop paradigm that ~78% use (Win7 + WinXP + OS X + Vista), join the new touch paradigm with ~19% (Win8 + Win8.1) or you can go your own way. My impression is that they're trying to design a car driven by joystick because some UX designer thought it was better, what's tested and works is too boring.

How about winning over some existing, established markets before trying to chase the latest fad? And even if it's not a fad, open source never moves fast enough to be first because there's no overall leader. Sure you could slap Linux on a tablet like Microsoft did with Windows many years before Apple, but it won't work well until all the application developers feel having a touch UI is an itch they need to scratch. Sure we can have visionaries, but Jobs was a visionary with an army of developers to turn them into reality. A Linux visionary is a man with a powerpoint slide. Or actually a LibreOffice Impress slide, I guess.

Comment Re:Just works? (Score 1) 484

If you want a "reliable" smart phone that doesn't need reset or suffer stupid ass software failures, get one of those $50 Samsung android smart phones. They are pretty reliable because they can't do much to begin with.

Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

Comment Re:aka "A stock pumper" (Score 1) 74

An analyst is generally not a person eating his own dog food, it's a person trying to sell his insight of the market to third parties as investment advice. What it means in practice is that you're trying to make a lot of statements that make you seem smart in hindsight but don't compromise your credibility when they don't pan out. Like in this case, if the Oculus Rift doesn't launch in 2015 this won't even be a footnote. If it does launch, he can point to this statement and say "Look, I wasn't sure but I had a hunch this would happen". You don't need to make any elaborate theories of stock manipulation, this is simply one analyst trying to pump up his own career.

Comment Re:and... (Score 0) 299

This isn't stupidity, exactly, it's obstinacy. And actually, it's cognitive dissonance. Typically, when you see someone passionately arguing against their own best interests, that is what at fault. In this case, one of the people ranting against solar and storage is arguing that if this were a good idea, it would have been done already, because they want to believe that they are more intelligent than Elon Musk, every PG&E employee, and the majority of slashdotters who have woken up and recognized that batteries have gotten immensely better within our lifetimes â" and will likely improve just as much in the next thirty or forty years.

You use a lot of big words, I don't think you know what any of them mean. What I argue is that there's structural differences that makes this a better idea to to centrally than at home, regardless of how good or cheap the batteries get. If it's cost effective for you to store the power in a battery and use it in the daytime it's going to be more cost effective for them to store the power in a battery and sell it to you in the daytime. The very reason they sell it cheap at night is that there's no cost effective way to store the excess power for later, if there were the low night prices would go away. You're on the wrong end of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, buddy.

Comment Re:So, Microsoft is a social leech! (Score 0) 103

Scenario A: Google back when they initially developed Android ran into a design roadblock. They saw no way to solve the particular problem until one of the developers read a MS patent that solved their issue. MS is therefore paid royalties on their patent.

It's not about finding a solution. It's about taking what somebody has worked on, experimented with, done usability testing, put in a product and convinced the market to use and have a second company come in and say thanks for all the hard work, in a month we'll have a cheaper clone doing the exact same thing.

Scenario B: Google developed Android without ever having heard of any MS patents.

...and not knowing of any product using any of the MS patents, even if they were unaware it was patented and by who. Particularly in the same business, it's rather hard not to know what features the competition is advertising. It's certainly hard to prove you didn't know about them. Submarine patents are a different story, but for example when they made Android they probably couldn't claim ignorance of any features the iPhone had. Even the business requirements and feature requests can be "contaminated" by other products, it's not a feature you'd have added unless someone else had done it first.

Of course sometimes you get unlucky and develop the exact same solution, but that also means you're reinventing the wheel. Do you want a medal? Or you might feel it's obvious and widespread now, but was it that obvious when it was patented? Ten years ago is a long time in the tech industry, things that I go "well, duuuuuuuuh" to today maybe wasn't. If they were, I'd like to go back and redo my investments. I'm sure you all remember the warm reception the iPod get, boy was that right on the money...

Comment Re:and... (Score 3, Insightful) 299

Cue Slashdotters claiming it is either impossible or a really bad thing in 3..2..1..

Impossible? No. Economical? I don't see how, if it were why isn't the power company doing this centrally? Then they could average it out across everyone on the grid, instead of just you as the problem is usually production not transmission capacity. I guess it might make sense if you're producing your own power with solar panels and don't have to transfer power into the grid when it's sunny and out of the grid when it's dark, but the price seems steep for what you're getting. I mean this tech already exists but only for solar powered cabins off the grid, it's really expensive per kWh and usually just to power light bulbs and such.

Comment Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score 1) 349

But you can't sit there and tell me that all the amenities around campus are there for no reason.

Absolutely not. They're there for various very important reasons.

However, none of those reasons are the one you postulate. If you look at each of them individually, drop your bias, and think about what benefit there could be to the company in providing that service to employees... it's generally very obvious.

In fact, a bathroom I used during an interview had a wall of cups and toothbrushes with employee names on them. People apparently stay at work so long that they need a dedicated toothbrush.

Where do you keep your toothbrush at work? Or don't you brush after lunch? Ick.

Comment Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score 1) 349

That sounds pretty unhealthy to me, especially given the present evidence of attrition suggesting that it is not a sustainable way of working.

Attrition at Google is very, very low, and what there is is mostly people leaving to found their own companies. As for how it sounds to you... you really don't know what you're talking about. Go spend some time with some of said young employees and you'll see why they feel it's fantastic.

So, you are an outlier who will have been employed for a different reason than the infantry and for whom expectations are different.

Nope, just another SWE.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 2) 304

And why would anyone willingly submit themselves to this abuse? I absolutely will not be adding hardware that only serves the purpose of limiting what I can do with my PC.

Does your computer have a HDMI/DisplayPort or DVI port made in the last 10+ years? You got DRM. Nothing keeps you from running the RMS-approved distro of choice and play all the creative commons content you like though, you won't notice it's there until you try to play protected content. And that's why boycotts won't work, the only reason to buy a DRM-incompatible version of the same hardware is so you can try to play protected content and bitch about it not working, kinda like buying a Mac and complaining it won't play PC games.

You must understand that the entire movie industry is in a "now or never" mode, DVDs was broken, BluRay was broken and these 4K discs will rival the cinema master (DCI 4K) in quality. If the standard is established enough they can't just ditch it and the DRM is broken, they won't be able to do one better. So they're trying to make this the most unholy DRM abomination ever, because if it fails it's game over. It's really that simple.

Comment Re:This never works (Score 2) 304

He shouldn't have said in the home - probably more the school yard and campus. We used to pirate stuff on floppy discs and later burned CD-Rs with MP3s. Before online activation was possible as a requirement you could just install as many times on as many PCs as you wanted. And it wasn't like we hoarded it, here's my collections of MP3s for your collection of MP3s just pick anything you like and if you don't want the rest just delete it. But I think that's a bit 80s and 90s thinking, then you had Napster and the 00s. If there's "casual copying" like we did today, it's a secondary effect of a torrent download, one downloads and spreads it around to friends and extended family. That seems quite likely to still be going on.

Comment Re:That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score 2) 349

From my experience, the "... requirements for good [company name here] interview questions ..." are mostly ignored and a recital of sort algorithms and quirky C++ anachronisms rule.

Not at Google. Engineers talk to each other a lot about what they ask in interviews, because one of the rules is that you must "calibrate" your questions, and the very best way to do that is by trying out your questions on your colleagues.

The goal, of course, is to select hires who are at least as good as you and you colleagues.

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