Well, I don't know about you, but I didn't buy a projector because it could project a maximum size of 300 inches... I bought it because it was far cheaper than practically every other remotely comparable large-form-factor television, even when projecting at "only" 80 inches, as I am. Thus, when the price of the hardware is factored into the equation, the amount of dough that you can expect to squeeze out of your viewing audience is dramatically impacted.

Which is to say: if Dreamworks actually goes down this path, then they had better find a way to convince every other studio to follow them... otherwise, I'll just stop watching Dreamworks films entirely in favor of their competition. (Pixar puts out some pretty darned good stuff, after all.)

And how do they propose determining the price for a projector, when a single unit can readily have a screen size ranging from 30 inches to 300 inches?

The conflict of interest is pretty unmistakable, here... but we have to keep in mind that even absent that conflict, this would still be the most obvious choice for both the former FCC commissioners and for the lobbying groups. The commissioners obviously have an interest in the field, and the lobbying groups would want to hire someone who knows more then a little bit about the inner workings of their "arch nemesis."

I mean... sure, moves like this will always have that sort'a greasy slimy feel to them, no matter how you cut it. But where else are they going to go?

(Plus, there's some pretty darned good scratch in going all turncoat!)

To clarify... that was 40 years old... not 40k. (Doh!)

My thoughts, exactly. Crud, I still don't make that kind of scratch, and I'm a Senior Software Engineer who is rapidly approaching 40! Frankly, I'd switch to welding in a heartbeat (and probably lower my heartrate considerably) if I could actually get a raise in the process.

I find it amusing that a post suggesting that Yahoo should basically just "close up shop and go home" was posted anonymously. It makes me wonder if perhaps the hands behind this particular post belong to someone at Google... who doesn't want Yahoo to succeed at it's various rumored "come back" plans, such as trying to swipe the default iOS search engine crown, and trying to build a YouTube competitor.

"Doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney!"

Windows based ATM machines are almost certainly running on XP Embedded, rather than the retail version of XP... support for Embedded doesn't end until January 2016. Thus, if the financial industry is moving away from XP to Linux, it isn't necessarily related to Microsoft's XP support schedules.

I switched technology careers at 30 myself; I went from help desk technician and system administration to web development, and I'm quite satisfied with the results. Of course, it probably helps that I'd already been trying to get into web development for the better part of the preceding decade... but that's not the point. The point is that it can indeed be done, if you have the skills and the drive to get where you want to be. Most jobs outside of the education field and higher sciences aren't nearly as difficult to break into, as people usually think.

My advice to you would be, very simply, just apply for the job you want, and see what happens. It'll most likely take more than a few interviews before you find someone willing to take a chance on you, and of course, you'll probably have to start out at an entry level position... but if you're coming from the educational field, then you probably won't take too much of a hit to your paycheck.

Frankly, Nike's advice actually works, here: if you want to get a different/better job... just do it.

Why does this sound so much like the makings of a B horror flick to me? (When it happens, just remember that you read it here first, folks.)

I have five kids, (ranging from three to eleven years old) and while they do sometimes play video games, (the four year old is almost better at MarioKart Wii than me, and he's only been playing it for less than a year!) my focus for them this year has been primarily Legos. We made a point of scavenging all of my old Legos from my parents house just a couple of months ago, and we purchased hundreds of dollars worth of new Legos for Christmas. And you know what? While only a couple of them have had any kind of a lasting interest in video games, every single one of them is perfectly happy to sit down with a pile of bricks in front of them, for hours on end.

I think there is just something intrinsically satisfying about building something with your own hands. Legos capture that in a simplified "child friendly" form like nothing else I've experienced in my own lifetime. So no: I won't focus specifically on those "vintage" video games... but I will be searching the web for PDFs of my old Lego kit instruction manuals. (So far, I've only found one... the official Lego site doesn't go far enough back in their archive. Yet.)

Scrum in-and-of-itself isn't really critical to the issue I was attempting to address; I was only using it to help illustrate that development teams do not have unlimited resources. Scrum is simply one of the tools that my particular team uses to organize and prioritize our workload, so that we can appropriately allocate what limited resources we do have. I hypothesized (within the context of the original thread) that Valve likely uses some similar management methodology to organize their own workload.

Also, not every dev shop has a dedicated "maintenance team"... I work in a small dev shop where all of us cross-task to both development and maintenance. So in my case, it's absolutely a given that higher priority tasks (such as new development of a highly anticipated game, for example) would take resources away from lower priority tasks (such as maintenance of a game that's over a decade old, and not bringing in any cash at all for the company).

Disclosure: I am an Apple fan -- but I absolutely will not defend the practice of purging negative comments from community forums. I think censorship is probably the single most frustrating experience anyone can have in a forum, warranted or not. I speak from experience: I've been censored recently as well -- in an entirely different forum, and for reasons which seemed entirely unreasonable to me. Ironically, I had made the egregious error of trying to help.

In responding to a thread about a bug, I described one software development methodology (scrum, if that matters) to a crowd of discontent gamers in the Steam forum. I then painstakingly crafted a reasoned explanation for why that process necessitates that this particular bug in an older game (Half-Life: Opposing Force, which had been recently ported to both Linux and Mac) simply won't be fixed anytime soon, because the Steam developers are almost certainly entirely wrapped up in the development of Half Life 3. I then went on to speculate (and I suspect this is where I went wrong) that as soon as we see a fix to that bug, we should all be on the lookout for the impending release of HL3. A short time later, that entire thread had suddenly vanished from the Steam forum, with no explanation.

And the problem crops up elsewhere as well; forum admins are frequently overzealous, especially when they see something that they view as a potential slight to their corporate overlords. It's a very unfortunate trend, and as I see it, the only way to avoid being unreasonably censored is to post your comments elsewhere, where -- hopefully -- unbiased management will leave your commentary on controversial matters intact. (Slashdot might qualify as such a haven... I know I haven't been censored here. Yet.)

Sounds like somebody might be reminiscing about The Magic School Bus.