I've noticed my HTC One - which has an aluminum frame - has a distinctly curved back to it. From the photo's I've seen, the iPhone looks like it has a fairly flat back, correct? I just tried flexing my phone a bit, and it didn't seem to give much at all. I wouldn't be too surprised if that shape was deliberately chosen to give the HTC phone extra structural rigidity?

I guess I'm not too surprised to see some issues like that with the race to make these devices lighter, thinner, AND bigger.

No, we've got compost bins already in the Seattle area, in addition to garbage and recycling bins. Generally speaking, the council is trying to reduce the amount of food waste sent to landfills by passing this law. Anything in compost bins is essentially recyclable material, so it's not considered "waste" in the broader sense.

I still say this is a ridiculous law, but it's not about discarding food - it's just about sorting it properly.

This is pretty typical of Seattle politics. It's about image rather than substance. This is the Seattle council wagging their fingers at us.

On the other hand, we have the mayor of Seattle refusing to consider declaring regions of the city as "no panhandling" zones. A man who runs a local hotel is pushing the idea after being assaulted by a homeless man for the *second* time. The mayor flatly refused, saying instead that they should instead do more to enforce existing laws - which of course, they don't.

So people continue to be harassed or even assaulted on the streets of Seattle by vagrants, but by the earth goddess, you'd better not be putting too much food waste in your trash bin!

Yep, fortunately a major cancellation has only happened once to me. There were a couple other prospective titles I spent a few months on in a "demo" stage at all that never went anywhere as well, but those were fairly minor blips in a career shipping quite a few titles. I actually knew a poor soul unlucky enough to have worked for many years on Duke Nukem Forever, and ended up leaving the company with very little to show other than some minor resume filler material.

As far as showing non-published or proprietary material, I've generally not found it to be a problem, as long as you're not foolish enough to post that material online where your former employers can find it. In any case, my advice to game developers is to build a portfolio of your own work that you can feel free to post online if you wish. If a prospective employer wants to see actual production code or assets, then you can discretely send off a selection of those in private.

Everyone involved in the process generally understands that portfolio art and demo code is to be treated as confidential material - and in any case, no one would have any incentive in blabbing about it to your former employer. So long as you're somewhat judicious in your selection of material and how you distribute it, I don't really see any problem with it.

I can tell you from my own experience, having had a nearly-complete game cancelled on me once during my career.

Game source material tends to be highly game-specific, and even more so for MMOs. It's saved forever in archives, of course, in case someone wants to pilfer something, but as technology marches on and tools are updated, it becomes harder to keep the game in a working state - especially for MMOs, who have extremely complex building and deployment requirements.

In terms of game code (not engine code, which is designed to be reusable, of course), there are two basic approaches to starting a new game. If you're working on a sequel or have a similar game in the company library, you can branch an existing game and start stripping it down - this let's you start with a working game, and then you can swap out systems on the fly with whatever needs to change. If the game is distinct enough and wouldn't benefit from this techinque, you can start clean, working on top of whatever shared engine and libraries you have, but still may copy over specific subsystems, or use them as a starting point for new systems. This obviously occurs if it's your first game, but also if it's the first game within a new genre that wouldn't benefit from the copy-and-modify approach. For instance, when I worked on a turn-based strategy game and most of the company's previous games were 3rd person adventure games, it would have been pointless to start from one of those games' source code.

For artwork, it really depends. Sounds, textures, and music are easily reused in many cases. Models and animations are a bit more of a question mark. Animations typically are matched to a specific rig and a specific set of game code that utilizes them. More often than not, all the game art tends to be too game-specific to be re-used for anything but a direct sequel, and often by then the assets aren't appropriate for the current state-of-the-art technology.

So, in short, it's archived away somewhere and most likely, only parts of the source code will be reused as a launching point for a new product. Most of the art assets will probably never be reused, unless they're fairly generic environmental textures, sound effects, or music that happen to match a new product's genre and style.

Don't worry. This technology seems really great for entertainment, but I fail to see a real use for it in most workplaces. How exactly is typing a letter or filling in data in a spreadsheet enhanced by VR? If anything, augmented reality would be more helpful, allowing contextual data to be displayed on-demand.

Besides which... hell, Windows 8 was too radical for the corporate world. And remember the furor over MS changing the Office interface? You really think they're going to start strapping VR headsets on people anytime in the near future?

Encryption is only enabled during transmission, but not at rest. The default backup program doesn't currently support the S3 server-side or client-side encryption protocols. If you really need to secure your data and can't trust S3's basic security, then this solution may not work for you.

There are 3rd party backup apps that do client-side encryption, but they use their own cloud services, not S3, so you'll probably pay a bit more for it. You may be able to use a standard Linux backup application, but there are no guarantees there, and you'd have to be comfortable enough to do a bit of tinkering under the hood to set it up manually.

Yep, I saw that and considered switching, but at the moment, there are a lot of handy S3 browsing and transfer tools, and not so much for Glacier (at least when I last looked - maybe that's changed). If I needed to, I wanted to be able to view or even retrieve my data with a simple Firefox plugin. Also, of course, there's almost zero financial incentive for me since I'm transferring such small amounts. Since I currently have a relatively slow DSL connection, backing up large amounts of data isn't all that practical anyhow.

For those with a lot of data to push up (photos, videos, etc), I absolutely agree. A weekly backup to Glacier makes a ton of sense, as it's designed specifically for backup scenarios.

Yeah, well, of course "writing code" is easy, just like typing coherent sentences in English is rather easy. It doesn't mean it's easy to write a novel any more than it means "programming is easy". The difficulty scales along with the scope and complexity of what you're trying to accomplish, as with most things in life.

Honestly, I was trying to exit the topic of conversation gracefully, because it didn't sound like he was open to any sort of reasonable discussion, and feels more like a trolling attempt than a conversation at this point - calling me "delusional", and implying I'm in denial, fearful of losing my job, and that a child could likely replace me at work. That doesn't seem like a conversation worth salvaging, but thanks for your reply.

I happen to have written large-scale commercial videogames in C++ for most of my career. I've worked with lots of people, many smarter than me, and I don't recall anyone talking about how their programming work was "ridiculously easy". I'm glad everything is so simple for you, but apparently we're not all so fortunate.

Since I work from home now and had to get a bit more serious about my data storage, I bought a Synology Diskstation, and have been quite happy with it. I was a bit worried because I'm more experienced with Windows than Linux by far, but they've got a great web-based interface and hide any sort of complexity, and it connects easily enough to Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.

The Synology has a nice backup program let's me to back up data to an Amazon S3 account. Since it's pay by data volume, and I'm only storing a few GB of code and assets, my monthly bill runs about ten cents a month. My local data is backup up to my NAS, and my NAS backs up to my S3 account. I figure I'm probably pretty well protected that way.

I can't compete with those racks in the linked article, though. My NAS box sits on a desk and has about the footprint of one of those phones, and it doesn't have nearly as many sexy blinking lights and exposed patch cables. Ah well.

Programming is sort of like cooking. Anyone can learn the basics and make some interesting and satisfying stuff - even an eight year old can to do some rudimentary stuff. I'd even venture to say that many people can make a living at it, as there are lots of jobs that don't involve doing incredibly demanding tasks - just basic production work. But there are also top tier jobs that require extremely experienced and talented professionals with years of study under their belt. Not everyone is suited for that job, but that's fine, since there are quite a bit fewer of them anyhow.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with making tuna casserole (using Hypercard to create a simple database application), but don't try to kid yourself it's basically the same thing as creating a full course meal at a four-star restaurant (writing low-level, high-performance code in C).

And, just like there are bad chefs to have no real business being in the kitchen, there are professional programmers who shouldn't be coding until they've polished up their skills or gained some more experience. The fact that there's so much badly written code out there seems to demonstrate that programming well is rather more difficult than many would like to admit.

It wasn't just about interface. People tend to forget how search engines did an absolutely horrible job of intelligently ranking the sites you wanted to see. They relied primarily upon keywords and other sort of fairly obvious metrics on the site itself, which of course can be significantly gamed. I've seen "tag clouds" on some sites and blogs, which I'm presuming is due in part to one of the historical metrics being how large a visible word is on a site - the obvious presumption being that keywords in titles should be weighted more heavily.

Google showed up and not only provided a vastly superior interface (look, all you want is to search, right? Here you go!), it also was the very first search engine that actually had a really good chance at returning the most relevant search as the very first result due to it's PageRank algorithm - hence, the "I'm feeling lucky!" button. Such a button would have been labelled "I'd love to win the lottery!" for other search engines, since the results you were looking for might well be on page 13 of a hundred pages of results returned.

One could argue that although Google did not invent web searching, they may have been the first ones to invent truly effective web searching algorithms. It was only the pressure of Google's overwhelming effectiveness that forced other companies to significantly improve their own search engines. Even today, other companies have a hard time even reaching parity with Google search, let alone exceeding it, although such metrics are obviously somewhat subjective.

I think people are just getting a little tired of the 3D printing hype. Yes, it's a cool emerging technology, but the sensationalism of these headlines and articles are a little grating at this point.

Calling it a "3D printed car" is not exactly lying, but it borders on disengenuous, seeing that the guts of the car are, of course, still manufactured the traditional way. It's apparently the body and frame that were printed, from what I can tell. Seriously, would that have been so damn hard to mention in the summary or the article? Oh, but that sounds a lot less impressive, doesn't it...

It was stated in the article that the car had 40 parts. I'm pretty sure they meant there were 40 printed parts, because there's no way in fuck you can build a car in 40 parts, unless you're conveniently counting the engine and frame as a single "part". Or maybe they're just counting each pre-packaged assembly as a "part".

I don't think people would complain quite as much if there was any real semblance of critical reporting here - less hype and more tech.

I stand by my statement that parents haven't been good for the industry. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has spent more on fighting patent-related lawsuits than they ever received in royalties from their own patents. Bezos himself has famously expressed his doubts about the current patent system both many years ago, and again more recently. Having entered the cutthroat world of mobile devices, I can imagine the patent minefield there is a pretty massive headache for them, as it seems to be for other major players.

In any case, the One-Click patent is a perfect example of why the patent office can't be trusted to adhere to the "patently obvious" principle anymore - at least, not with software. Such a mechanism was pretty damn obvious to anyone who knew how cookies worked, and was a pretty obvious extension of that existing technology, certainly not worthy of a patent, and not for such a ridiculously long time. It was simply a legal license to extort money from competitors because Amazon happened to beat everyone to the punch in patenting a rather obvious web-based mechanism for making shopping more convenient.