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Comment I looked into writing this stuff a decade ago. (Score 1) 250

I take BART into work and sometimes got a ride home, and sometimes I'd forget to pick up my car. So , I realised that location based alarms were a technically feasable feature using GPS units or the newer cellphones that were location aware - so you'd be able to setup reminders to pick up your car when the bay bridge was crossed, or pick up milk when you entered a supermarket.

Back then there was no iPhone and getting the location info on most phones was just too much trouble so I abandoned the idea after a couple of weeks poking around.

Comment Failing Test != Failing Interview (Score 1) 743

I have a reputation for being hard on candidates, and I do like to push them way out of their comfort zone, I like to use red ink on their resumes when I think a skill they claim is unjustified.

But, I'm more interested in how they attempt to do things rather than whether they really solve the problem. Some people crank out code instantly which has bugs, others just freeze up and I have to go elsewhere, but it's all part of judging the person.

Comment Re:Both My Kids GO To A Waldorf School (Score 2) 333

Also, I feel the need to point out that this is a public charter school in Oakland, I don't pay any fees to send them there, but positions are limited. Most Waldorf schools are private. Truthfully I wasn't looking for specifically for a Waldorf school, we were just looking around for schools that were most likely to provide a good education.

Comment Both My Kids GO To A Waldorf School (Score 3, Interesting) 333

They're pretty tech Savvy (Skye is even e-famous for playing Eve Online) but we felt that the school environment worked well for them. They're learning knitting as part of the hand skills but it's not just picking up some needles and yarn, they started out making their own yarn and needles - it's like those crazy hacker types who want to build their own computer and operating system :)

Comment A Bigger Problem Was Incarna (Score 1) 106

A lot of the player anger was driven by the fact that this arrived as part of an 'expansion' that managed to take away popular features and forced players to use the Walking In Stations interface even though said interface was incredibly resource intensive and melted GPU's. Also, they screwed up several months previously when at the last minute they dropped support for older CPU's because the library that simulated clothes and hair needed SSE3 extensions. The deployment of the new avatar technology has just been a mess and actual 'flying in space' features have been left unmaintained at the expense.

It should also be pointed out you didn't need to spend real money for microtransactions, you could buy PLEX from other players (who wanted to convert real money into game money) and then, this being Eve, you could troll other players by flying around with MT items that cost more than a capital ship.

Comment Armaggedon vs Deep Impact: (Score 1) 449

Both these movies came out when I was working on my Thesis, which was about the impact hazard, so being something of an expert on the subject I knew I had to see these movies, and I knew I'd probably get annoyed by broken physics in both of them.

Paradoxically however, I loved Armageddon way more than Deep Impact. Armageddon just threw out any notion of reality right at the start and instead distracted me with stupid stunts and amusing one liners. Deep Impact kept trying to get things right, and kept just missing and had 1/3 of a good story which left me bored and uninterested.
(Deep Impact's worst sin was having the comet perform a 90degree turn just before impact, but you needed to be an astrphysicist paying a lot of attention to notice) .

Getting physics wrong is a lesser sin than crossing your own internal story consistency TBH, you can excuse writers for not knowing physics, but if they setup a rule in one scene and then break it in another then that's entirely their own mistake.

Comment Re:keep daleks, get rid of writers (Score 2) 332

Sorry, Current generation of Who is consistently better than anything else from the modern of classic era, I've watched ever episode that exists and listened to all the Big Finish audio production and the Moffat era Who really is magnificent.

It says a lot that the best episodes in recent years have all been Moffat penned:
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
The Girl In The Fireplace
Blink
Silence In the Library/Forest of The Dead
and of course.... he's now the producer, he's yet to top 'Blink' - but it's consistenly better on so many levels that I find myself feeling sorry for both Tennant and Ecclestone who were fine actors but kept on being given poor scripts to work with.

There are many many classic era episodes that rank up there with the current generation - 'The Talons of Weng Chiang' and 'Genesis of the Daleks' being two particularly fine examples. But there's sooooo much mediocre dross like timelash that brings the classic show down.

Comment myplay.com did this in 1999 with no legal issues (Score 2) 539

Yes, before mp3.com launched their my.mp3.com service which was declared illegal.

Myplay tried to get the record industry interested in downloads, but they couldn't get any interest from the majors, the best they could do was their online storage service and DMCA compliant user tailored radio streams. No flash in those days either, you needed to configure winamp or some other external player to actually stream the content.

myplay never had any legal issues, they simply didn't have enough money to maintain such a service back when terabytes of disk space were only available in refrigerator sized racks of disks, and when most people were still on modem connections.

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