I just moved from Seattle to Phoenix, strangely enough it was because my job in Seattle ended and I couldn't get another job. The tech market for interviewees sucks in Seattle, I knew about the job closing for 6 months and still couldn't find a job there. So in a lark I applied to a job in Phoenix/Chandler. Had a phone call from them in 2 hours, an on-site scheduled 2 hours later. Call the day after the interview saying they're getting an offer together.

The job turned out to be about 2 levels above what I was applying for in Seattle. Love the weather here and don't regret leaving Seattle at all. They actually appreciate 15+ years of software engineering experience here. In Seattle all they seemed to care about was big O notation, not what you can actually do.

You might have the same problem I have. But I don't think I'll notice the change personally. I'm 6'4" tall (190cm) and I'm in pain if I don't get up from those seats at least every two hours and walk to the bathroom. I have a hard time getting into them now as it is, and usually I fly on short notice and I'm stuck in the middle. I'm quite sure that the airlines are having some sort of joke on the big guys, and see how many they can sit next to each other.

The last time I flew internationally (10 hour flight from Seattle to Amsterdam) I got lucky and upgraded to 'comfort' class and the booking agent apologized that I was tuck in the bulkhead row. Stuck? Man that was comfortable I could stretch out. But she was able to do better on the way back, and got me a proper seat. That was painful, and cramped. I had to get the guy on the aisle to let me out 5 times, and each time I was moving like an old man (and I'm not that old).

So I don't think I'll notice the loose of 1 little inch. My knees already run into the back of the seat in front of me. My shoulders already overflow onto the seats besides me. I might notice that my butt will be snug in the seats though.

But if they're jamming more people onto the plane, are they increasing the overhead bin capacity? When I fly I always take a small roller bag for my clothes and a laptop bag. I usually get these stowed (roller bag up top and laptop bag under the seat in front of course) but its usually cramped, and people who come in late always seem to try to jam in on top of everything. Somehow I doubt it as that is passenger convenience, and some airlines (I'm looking at you American) are charging for every checked bag you have. They're currently offering the checked carry on for free, but that might change in the future.

I'm not being conspiracy nut in this. This is just one more tool that HR departments can use to keep pay low for people applying for work at a company. They always ask for what your current salary is. Before an applicant could lie and tell the HR department a higher number and get offered that higher number. Now they can just check this database and see what the number actually is.

When I job switched in the past I've never been offered a number higher than what I currently made when I was truthful about my salary, and I screwed myself over. There was a time when I worked for a start-up and my salary was frozen for four years. When that job died I told my new employer what I was making and got offered a bit less since it was a rough job market. The raises I got at that job were less than inflation. The last time I switched I took my salary at the start of the previous job, ran it through the inflation calculator, added 10% and told that number to the new company. That was the number that I was offered, and they gave me some song and dance about it was a privilege about working in the industry when I tried to see if I could get it higher. So I got a 17% raise over my previous company.

Now with this database that tactic is no longer viable. And if you don't tell them the current number you're making and then check it out, they can mark you as dishonest. Kind of hypocritical if you ask me.

Speaking as a developer of console games. The CPUs are the same between the dev kits and the retail console, so running unoptimized code will run the same on both CPUs. Where the kits differ is usually in the supporting hardware.

Both the Xbox360 and the PS3 had additional hardware in the box to aid in debugging. The PS3 had another 128 megs of ram. And a second Ethernet port. Being an online engineer I almost worshipped that second Ethernet port. Being able to put the 'game' port onto a packet filter (for latency, and other testing) while having the debug port still available unhindered was very valuable.

The PS3 also had a hard drive for running BluRay emulation on.

The Xbox360 (the ones I played with), had the same RAM on both the dev kit and the retail kit, they did add another 512 megs in later versions, but I never got to play with it. The side car had equipment for hooking up USB for DVD emulation and debugging support. It also had an internal hard drive, which the retail kits didn't have.

Mainly the 'better' specs were for debugging, not for actually running the software on.

Don't forget the five songs, sung by the characters and the tap dance numbers with the characters twirling around the light sabres and spinning around them. Of course the songs will recap the entire plot because the audience had probably missed it completely by that point.

Suddenly all those dancing Storm Trooper Kinect mini games make sense. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGVvTfr0xn4

Perhaps the makers of the video game weren't so far off the mark after all.

There's a good link I usually pass out when people start to talk about noticing the difference between 720p and 1080p.

http://hd.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/

Now I don't know where the line for 4320p would be since the article is old, but if you look at the line for 1080p at a viewing distance of 5 feet you need a TV around 38 inches. For 1440p at the same distance you need a TV around 51 inches, a difference of 13 inches.

1080p is 2,073,600 pixels
1440p is 3,571,200 pixels
4320p is 33,177,600 pixels

1440 is 1.33... times bigger than 1080
3,571,200 is 1.72... times bigger than 2,073,600
4320 is 3 times bigger than 1440
33,177,600 is 9.29 times bigger than 3,571,200

Using simple linear approximation:
If you take just a 3 times bigger standard 1440p -> 4320p you need 29 more inches, or a TV that is 67 inches, or 3,571,200 -> 33,177,600 you need 70 more inches, or a TV that is 109 inches wide at 5 feet to get the full benefit of 4320p.

I don't know about you but sitting 5 feet away from 109 inches wouldn't work for me. 67 inches is doable, but that's still a huge TV to be only 5 feet away. I don't think you can follow all the action across the entire screen from that distance.

Its a different process. I also work in the gaming industry, and on consoles.

The base game is usually a 10 week lead time from 'gold' (or final) till its on the shelves. Most of that time is certification with 1st party. There's one first party that wants 12 weeks of cert time. I've also worked on a game with an accelerated release schedule. Final, cert and ship in 3-4 weeks

Patches are usually 2 weeks, though maybe 4 weeks sometimes. Though I've had patch go through in two days before, of course that was the second submission of the patch, and the change was as stupid icon change (We put it on the left, where it fit better with the art, they demanded it on the right).

If the DLC doesn't have compiled code in it, then the DLC usually breezes through, maybe taking a week, though one 1st party likes to take 6 weeks with them.

Anyone in the industry that's had to deal with certification can tell you what a pain it is. There's no consistency to the process. One game might submit following one process and a game released three weeks later might follow a different process, it all depends on how much the 1st party wants your game on their console. Or how much they want to screw around with you.

10 years is probably too short, but you're right that copyright laws are broken. I do like 10 years as a good number to work from.

I think copyright should be broken into personal and corporate copyright. Personal copyright is owned by the author. Corporate by a corporation.

Personal copyright should have a maximum 10 year exclusive license limit, after ten years the license should be renegotiated, and perhaps transfered to another publisher. He time limit for personal copyright should be Death or twenty years whichever is longer.

Corporate copyright should be free for 10 years. And then renewed in each country that the corporation wants to enforce it in for $10,000 for then next 10 years, then $100,000 for ten more years and so on. So:

0-10 years free
11-20 years $10,000 per country
21-30 years $100,000 per country
31-40 years $1,000,000 per country ...

If a company wants to bankrupt itself to keep a copyright that's fine but it'll quickly become too expensive for companies not to let copyrit lapse.

Breaking digital locks should not be illegal. You blame the lock if it gts broken, safes and locks are rated by how long it takes to break into them. Also you could look at it as a National Security question, if you my cryptography illegal, only crimals will be cryptologists. And then how are you going to secure your communications? Digital locks are a good way to train the next generation of cryptologists, and keep them practiced.

Being that small won't pose a hazard. I can't find a good link to the development of anti-aircraft radar before world war II. But the development team got a message during the first field test from the field engineers: 'It tracked seagulls' or something like that, and it took them a while, trying to figure out what the field engineer meant, it being a top secret project and they thought the FE was being cryptic. No he was being completely open. The nearest link I could find to that story is: http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Lee_Davenport

On another note, I'm not sure why the US would bother shooting a sea to air missile at the drone. Five inch flak shells are cheaper. I think that's one of the standard gun armaments the Navy carries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/54_caliber_Mark_45_gun

All the Navy would have to claim is they were test firing the gun, and the drone just got in the way. Radar tracked shells are fairly accurate after the first one has been fired, and they would probably only need two of them, most likely they'd only need one. Much cheaper than expending a missile, and it would probably just hit the budget as: Ordinance expended during training. Just like a 5.56mm round fired out of a rifle.

I had to reread the sentence in the summary, probably because I was just reading up on the Enterprise recently. But the first time I read the entry I thought it meant the longest of any warship, as in the length of the hull. According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_longest_ships and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercarrier (look at the first picture's caption) the USS Enterprise is still the longest warship in US history (and anyone else's).

So who knows maybe that's what they meant by the longest of any warship after putting in the —

If they could Apple should buy a majority share in Microsoft. Then close down the operating system division, killing support for it. Keep the good products, like Office and Visual Studio. Merge the Xbox division into the AppleTV division, and then spin off or close the rest of Microsoft.

While immediately it looks like a bad move because they're sacking the company. Killing the operating system division would leave Apple's competitors in the PC market like Dell and HP out to dry. We've seen from the past that not many people want Linux, which is a shame. And this effectively leaves OSX as the only viable OS in the market. Apple would just have to make sure they have enough parts on hand to build up their production capacity to meet the demand of the PC manufacturers that no-longer have an operating system. With Apple being the only large computer manufacturer around at this time their stock would rise again after the hit of sacking Microsoft.

This would also kill most of the beige box component manufacturing as well, since most custom PCs run windows. And those customers would have to go looking for a PC eventually and the only real game in town would be the small time manufacturers using Linux, or Apple.

If they also make Office and Visual Studio OSX only products that will start moving corporate customers to their Macs, and iPads. BSD is already a server class operating system, and OSX is pretty darn close to it so they could move back into servers at this time, hell they'll have a monopoly on PCs, and Windows Server 20XX wouldn't be on the market, and the current server products wouldn't be supported.

But this move would probably be seen as a monopolistic move and hopefully killed by the SEC. And Microsoft Market Cap is 264 billion and there's no way for Apple to get a majority share in it. But that's a move I wouldn't put past Apple. Actually I wouldn't put it past any board of directors if they could pull it off. They'd dump their Microsoft stock first of course, its only insider trading if you get caught. A few bribes... campaign contributions, will get them past the SEC.

The price on a console game is usually set by the console manufacturers. So the launch of all games is usually the ~$60 (depending on country). As the game gets older it'll start to drop in price. Microsoft and Sony set the launch price to be the same, and they also set the licensing costs to be about the same. I don't know the normal price of licensing for the console but I think its something like $10 per disc sold, because they sell the consoles at a loss and make up their profit on this licensing. And when you use the rule of thumb that the price of a product doubles every time it changes hands then this $10 is a fair amount of the cost of a game, since it has to change hands at least once. The publishers probably sell the game to Walmart and Gamestop at $30 and they sell at $60, and with the publishers giving a third to Microsoft and Sony they aren't taking as much in as you think. The third also matches pretty closely to what Microsoft and Sony take for digital revenue on their consoles, so the $10 is probably pretty close.

Nintendo makes a profit on the hardware so their licensing isn't so extreme and the games for the Wii are usually cheaper. You'll sometimes see games for higher prices then the $60 launch price, but these are usually games with extras: special edition, controller in the box, etc.

An easier way for Sony to do it, is that they use their patching pipeline. A PS3 patch includes a complete copy of the executables (selfs). If people play the old games (unpatched) then they can't play online. If they want to play online then they have to use the new keys. If the PS3 firmware sees that the old key is being used it doesn't allow people to play online or acquire trophies.

This way people can play the old games (unpatched), the online community is 'safe' (for an unspecified value of safe) from cheaters. Sony has already had to sign the selfs from the publishes. They should be able to just resign them and issue a new patch.