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Comment Re:Yet another story... (Score 1) 124

Sales are not profit. R* didn't make a billion dollars in one day. GTA V sold $1B worth of copies in a day. At best R* will see about 40% of that. Even then, VCs aren't going to just jump at game development. GTA is the exception, not the rule. It cost over $265M and took somewhere in the neighborhood of five years to make GTA V. During development *every* R* studio was involved with it. There were no other games in production. There was no fallback plan, essentially. GTAV was risky every way you look at it. Mitigating that risk was the fact that it was GTA and that R* has a proven record of being able to deliver. While that's great for them it's only great for them. Take an extremely large random collection of game developers, give them $265M and five years to make a game. You won't see $1B in sales on the first day. Chances are depressingly better than average that you won't break even. Except for the large well established studios (studios, not publishers) it's a very risky industry. VCs are generally risk averse.

Comment Re:another futurama? (Score 4, Interesting) 390

Cute Kid: Hubert (who was added explicitly as the annoying 'cute' kid.)

Wedding: That's the last episode, according to the rag sheets

Inexplicable actor replacement: WELSHIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (ok, granted, it was a guest star, and was done only because James Doohan politely declined to do the Star Trek episode)

So other than that you've got Jumping the Shark, which most folks would call the movies. I'd fine with the show either way. It had a nice run, even if the comedy central episodes didn't quite have that mind blowing awesomeness (which, who knows, maybe after a few years in reruns they'll develop.)

Comment Re:I can slack off anywhere (Score 1) 529

Depends on your metric. If your metrics are based on your web proxy logs, code commits, ticket closures, or any other number of metrics, you're not even close to being a star.

The fact that the articles says she "checked the VPN logs" leaves us very short on detail. If the VPN isn't doing split tunnel, and all of the outbound web traffic is showing the users are spending their days shopping on amazon and updating facebook, then I'd say she made a decent choice. We're not really sure. The data *we* have to analyze her decision is sparse at best.

Overall, Yahoo needs to change. There is literally nothing that I'd call them "great" at. They are the Chrysler of the web. An amalgamation of cobbled together parts that has only the vaguest sense of direction. Mayer needs to reinvent a LOT of this company. Their management sounds stagnant and bloated and the workforce seems apathetic. Are they going to lose talent? Absolutely. But getting butts in the seats, more than filling up the parking lot, brings in at least a small shred of accountability. If the boss walks in and sees you doing jack shit, she's going to want to know why.

Far from being the death of telecommuting, this was just phase one; getting rid of the people who simply can't be bothered with showing up to work. It'll come back, but the message from the top is a little clearer. 1999 was 14 years ago. Sitting around in your aeron chair waiting for your stock option to kicking while "working" from home is a thing of the past. Phase two at Yahoo will probably be layoffs. Maybe phase three will be a step towards profitability.

Comment Re:A small percentage are veterans (Score 2, Interesting) 525

The 10,000ft view of that particular POV is this;

-Military service gives you a bullshit tolerance that's considerably higher than that of the average person.

-You gain a much better understanding of how to be a cog in a machine. Right now, we have a legislative body full of "mavericks" and "rebels" who couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the directions were on the bottom, mostly because working *with* someone else is perceived as a sign of weakness. You understand that whether you're a big cog or a little cog, none of you get anything done alone.

-The "we oughta bomb them fuckers" mentality gets tempered somewhat by service. To a legislator that didn't serve, actions like Grenda are considered 'saber rattling' and 'showing force.' To someone who served, Grenda is "that place where that guy from basic was killed. Man, what was his name? His sister was super hot and I think his Dad was the guy I talked to at graduation who served with my Uncle..." Different perspectives.

It's a blanket statement to say that they're somehow "better" qualified. Veterans can be total fuckheads as well (Hi there, Randy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Cunningham ), and they can be ideologically polluted tools who spout nothing but party lines, but the general rule is that at least there *some* baseline for those folks.

Comment Re:Vote (Score 1) 707

You mean the airline industry that has been in a state of near constant bankruptcy across the board as major carriers fight fare wars in the name of short term profit by shirking contractual obligations through chapter 11 filings & mergers?

Yeah, deregulation has been fantastic in the airline industry. I especially like the "Sorry, we drove ourselves broke. The executive board is taking action. The board is giving themselves a huge bonus (to retain such high quality executives) and golden parachutes, and we're dumping the retirement of the people who work for a living on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBGC )" game. That's f*cking awesome.

Comment Re:Fuel logistics (Score 1) 107

My understanding is the Diesel stores far better than gasoline due to the lack of ethanol (which plays absolute hell on rubber fuel lines in home generators) and other additives. It still doesn't last forever, but it does better than gasoline.

Overall, natural gas is the preferred solution out here in the midwest. You don't have to store it on site if you're in a reasonably urban area (But you can, just install a pig out back), gasoline powered generators run on it with minimal modifications, and the earth tends not to quaketh so much round here so ruptured lines aren't an issue.

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