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Comment Re:AT&T customer uses $24,298.93 in services (Score 1) 234

The problem is AT&T would rather bill the person then actually look into an anomaly. The average person spends what, max $100 / month on long distance? And $15K _didn't_ set off any alarms that _maybe_ something was wrong?!?! Nope, they just billed the person with the attitude "Not our problem"

It's called "Having respect for your customers",

not

"Let's fuck them over any chance we get -- not our problem until it is our problem"

Submission + - #GamerGate meet up in Washington DC subjected to bomb threat (reaxxion.com)

Submitted by Motor
Motor writes: The consumer revolt going by the title #GamerGate arranged a real life event last night in a bar in Washington DC. The event was attended by a wide variety of people from all walks of life — all tired of the corruption and extremist gender politics in games media.

Despite efforts by so-called Social Justice Warriors to get it stopped by emailing and tweeting the bar owners, the meet up went ahead as planned — and a fine time was had by all. Later in the evening the event was temporarily halted as a bomb threat was called into the police.

The police are looking into the matter and bomb threats made in the US capital are, shall we say, no joke. It's going to be interesting to see the outcome of the investigation. Especially given some of the poorly-judged tweets sent by anti-gamers in the run up to the event.

Comment Re:I must be old (Score 1) 87

I concur. Visually it is mildly interesting but it ignores the elephant in the room:

* Modern game design spends more time focusing on form then function

Grind-Grind-Grind! /glares at Warframe, Path of Exile, Diablo, etc.

When your refer to your customers as whales attempting to suck as much money out of them as possible, the industry of shovelware is fucked

Comment Re:No. Write your own fucking engine. (Score 1) 125

by UnknownSoldier (#49600457) Attached to: Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines?

While there is some truth to that, you haven't been keeping up to date with Orgre's design and architecture changes:

Orgre 2.0 Pitfalls and Design Proposal
* http://www.mediafire.com/downl...

They ditched OOP and incorporated DOD (Data-Orientated-Design) for a 5x performance increase!
* http://www.yosoygames.com.ar/w...

Mike Acton is a respected programmer in the video game industry, and he's right. In fact, if you were paying attention I listed his famous Typicall C++ Bullshit as reference in my Ogre 2.0 proposal.

OgreNode.cpp was written 13 years ago when OO programming was all the rave (still is?) everyone had a single core, caches didn't matter and most efficient way to cull the world was to use an Octree or a BSP. The world believed that "if( dirty )" was a magical, no-cost expression that is immediately a performance improvement wherever used to avoid the execution of more than 3 instructions.

13 years later, Moore's law kicked us in the butt and everyone is multicore. You probably know that story already.

Mike Acton reviewed the 1.9 version. Perhaps it would've been more interesting to see a review of the 2.0 file which has been refactored to better fit Data Oriented Design principles (and I'm sure there are things I wrote to criticize). Many of the things he criticizes of 1.9 have been fixed. Nevertheless there are things we can learn. Note that if he weren't right, then it would be hard to explain why there was a 5x performance increase between 1.9 and 2.0.

Mike Acton's DOD comments
* http://bounceapp.com/116414

Comment We already had this discussion _many_ times .... (Score 2) 125

by UnknownSoldier (#49600401) Attached to: Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines?

... over on Reddit. It keeps getting rehashed:

* Game Engine Design
* UE4 is now completely free
* wishlist game engine from scratch
* differences between Unity and Unreal
* UE4 vs Unity Faceoff
* More AAA games using unity?
* AAA are all free

There are still 2 reasons to "roll your own" game engine:

- To learn. i.e. See this uber diagram of all the components of a modern game engine!

and

- The popular engines still do a terrible job of dynamic terrain management, instancing, meshing, etc. Rolling your own such as Proc World, say using dual contouring, etc., means it is easier to fit into your rendering pipeline instead of trying to figure out someone else's architecture.

Submission + - Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX12 Demo Impresses At Microsoft BUILD (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the past several years and are starting to blur the line between animation and real actors. One of the more difficult tasks for CG artists is to recreate human emotions, especially crying, though you wouldn't know it after watching a tech demo that Square Enix showed off at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference. The real-time tech demo is called Witch Chapter 0 [cry] and is part of a research project that studies various next generation technologies. For this particular demo, Square Enix put a lot of research into real-time CG technology utilizing DirectX 12 in collaboration with Microsoft and NVIDIA, the company said. It's an ongoing project that will help form Square Enix's Luminous Studio engine for future games. The short demo shows some pretty impressive graphics, with an amazing level of detail. As the camera zooms in, you can clearly see imperfections in the skin, along with glistening effects from areas where the face is wet with either tears or water.

Comment Re:Huh (Score 1) 52

by UnknownSoldier (#49596579) Attached to: Debian GNU/Hurd 2015 Released

That's good question. Looks like they were too lazy to optimize it for the ~4.5 GB DVD / layer ...

[ ] debian-hurd-2015-i386-DVD-1.iso 24-Apr-2015 07:24 1.7G
[ ] debian-hurd-2015-i386-DVD-2.iso 24-Apr-2015 07:28 1.7G
[ ] debian-hurd-2015-i386-DVD-3.iso 24-Apr-2015 07:32 1.8G

The "typical" excuse would be to help with downloads but seriously who is using a downloader that can't resume in this day and age?

Since the total is 5.2GB I wonder if they could re-compress the files down to 4.5 GB to fit on one DVD with say something like LZMA

Submission + - The $350 Apple Watch costs $84 to manufacture. (qz.com) 2

Submitted by chasm22
chasm22 writes: You can bet Apple is betting on its loyal base to counter this with the good old adage of who cares "it just works". I guess 'it just works' just works as a excuse for excessive profits under any and all circumstances. Because apparently the watch is going to make more profits percentage wise than any previous Apple product.

Submission + - Judge Tosses United Airlines Lawsuit Over 'Hidden City' Tickets (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: United Airlines lost a legal round in its effort to stop a website that helps people find “hidden city” ticket pairs. The airline, along with online travel site Orbitz, sued New York-based Skiplagged.com and its founder, Aktarer Zaman, in November seeking an injunction to stop the site from sending users to Orbitz to purchase United tickets. A federal judge ruled Thursday that Illinois isn't the proper venue for the carrier's claims.

Submission + - NSA Reform Bill Backed by Both Parties Set to Pass House of Representatives

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that after more than a decade of wrenching national debate over the intrusiveness of government intelligence agencies, a bipartisan wave of support has gathered to sharply limit the federal government’s sweeps of phone and Internet records. A bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the metadata surveillance exposed by Edward J. Snowden overwhelmingly passed the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of a 25-2 vote and is heading to almost certain passage in the House of Representatives while an identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader. "The bill ends bulk collection, it ends secret law,” says Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the original author of the Patriot Act who has now helped author the Freedom Act. “It increases the transparency of our intelligence community and it does all this without compromising national security.”

The Patriot Act is up for its first reauthorization since the revelations about bulk data collection. The impending June 1 deadline for reauthorization, coupled with an increase of support among members of both parties, pressure from technology companies and a push from the White House have combined to make changes to the provisions more likely. The Snowden disclosures, along with data breaches at Sony Pictures, Target and the insurance giant Anthem, have unsettled voters and empowered those in Congress arguing for greater civil liberties protection — who a few years ago “could have met in a couple of phone booths,” says Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. The Freedom Act very nearly passed both chambers of Congress last year, but it failed to garner the 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate. It fell short by two votes.

However some say the bill doesn't go far enough. The bill leaves intact surveillance programs conducted by the Drug Enforcement Agency and levies high penalties against those offering “material support” to terrorists. It also renews the expiring parts of the Patriot Act through 2019. "This bill would make only incremental improvements, and at least one provision – the material-support provision – would represent a significant step backwards,” says American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer. “The disclosures of the last two years make clear that we need wholesale reform.”

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