bigHairyDog - Slashdot User

Comment Tell the company what's in it for them (Score 3, Insightful) 167

by bigHairyDog on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @03:25AM (#41678775) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Get Paid For Open-Sourcing Your Work?

I recently successfully persuaded the company that I freelance for to open source a core part of their product line. The part we open sourced was essentially the engine that powers several other products. I had a whole page of benefits prepared, but the main one was this:

"Your developers don't seem to realise that the core engine is supposed to be a general purpose platform, almost like an operating system - it needs to be very well documented, and it absolutely can't have any code in it that is specific to one of the applications that runs on it. If you open source it and give it its own website and code repo, your developers will finally understand what it is, and stop dumping application specific code into it when then need to implement a new application-level feature. This will save you time because you won't have to be constantly refactoring application code out of the platform."

Also, "open source is cool, and having an open source product will make it easier hiring new developers" seemed to go down well.

Blizzard Previews Revamped Battle.net 188

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @05:40AM from the find-out-precisely-how-bad-you-are dept.

Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting: "When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."

For GUIs, Just the Right Degree of Realism 256

Posted by timothy on Friday January 22, 2010 @09:36AM from the insightful-line-drawing dept.

mr crypto writes "User interfaces make copious use of pictures and symbols, but how abstract should images be? Lukas Mathis has an interesting blog entry on where to draw the line."

Startup Tests Drugs Aimed at Autism 171

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 11, 2010 @05:52AM from the whose-x-you-callin'-fragile dept.

An anonymous reader sends in this link from Technology Review about a startup company testing drugs that may help those with autism-spectrum disorders — even adults. "Seaside Therapeutics, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, is testing two compounds for the treatment of fragile X syndrome, a rare, inherited form of intellectual disability linked to autism. The treatments have emerged from molecular studies of animal models that mirror the genetic mutations seen in humans. Researchers hope that the drugs, which are designed to correct abnormalities at the connections between neurons, will ultimately prove effective in other forms of autism spectrum disorders. ... The company is funded almost entirely by an undisclosed family investment of $60 million, with $6 million from the National Institutes of Health. [A spokesman] says that Seaside has enough funding to take its compounds through clinical testing and approval."

Surgeon Makes Tutorial DVD For Conscious Open-Heart Surgery 170

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 08, 2010 @01:58PM from the looks-easy-enough dept.

Lanxon writes "Swaroup Anand, 23, from Bangalore, was fully conscious as he underwent open-heart surgery. An epidural to the neck, administered at the city’s Wockhardt Hospital, numbed his body during the procedure. Dr Vivek Jawali pioneered the technique ten years ago and has recently released a tutorial on DVD, which gives a step-by-step guide to the procedure for other surgeons to watch and learn from."

Comment There is a good technical reason why this is done (Score 3, Informative) 346

by bigHairyDog on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @01:19PM (#24404611) Attached to: Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?

Google is obsessive about reducing HTML size for fast delivery, and that explains two of your observations.

The JS obfuscation is code reduction - all the variable names are replaced with a single letter and the white space stripped in all of google's JS code to reduce the script length (though no doubt they like the fact that this makes reverse engineering hard too.)

Adding the events after the page loads means you can loop over the array of links returned by document.getElementsByTagName("A"), instead of adding the handler as text to every link.

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