You must not follow politics. :)

This admission of guilt seemed more gloating than sincere.

So I guess both the Pacific Northwest and the UK are screwed.

And the previous article on Slashdot - http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/02/16/2146227/A-Warming-Planet-Can-Mean-More-Snow

Means even more humidity.

Next they'll say you can't operate the phone near a kitchen or bathroom since they contain water. And public restrooms, completely out of the question.

When I think of game development, I think of milestones. I think of (relatively) set targets. This is more true for console games than PC game, but lately when I think of games I think console first.

Iterative style development? Maybe that might work for an MMO where the customers don't mind being permanent beta testers. The gap in QA between professional and game software development already feels pretty vast, but add to that yet another style that promotes a more aggressive, less strict regimen of development just sounds like a recipe of disaster.

I'm not sure when Agile became the silver bullet buzzword for programming. I have participated in it, attended Ken Schwaber's talks on managing scrums. I can see its positives and negatives, and it's difficult for me to see how game software development could benefit from being agile unless you're coming up with the next big project with a bunch of friends in your 'garage'. Designing your own game engine and concepts from the ground up where nearly every member of your team is a software architect level and the lightweight methods help. Otherwise if you're a code jockey working on a pre-existing engine then project management and deadlines are likely more effective.

And try pairing up agile software development with offshoring. It reminds me of the old "don't do drugs" commercials with the eggs.

*holds up an egg* this is your software development
*cracks egg* this is going agile
*opens egg over stove* this is agile offshoring
*ignores the fact that there is no pan to catch the egg* any questions?

Blame the editors.

Or blame dem edit'rs in true backwoods vernacular.

And start blocking Chinese IP Blocks?

I have been carving large blocks of Chinese owned IP blocks and putting them into the iptable INPUT DROP. Why? Because 90% of ssh probing have been from those IP addresses. If this keeps up, China won't need a Great Firewall since more and more people will just refuse to peer with them.

If you worked for any length of time in or with big business, you'd be surprised to find that someone is actually saying "the emperor has no clothes on".

It may seem like common sense, but there are reasons why Officespace and Dilbert are so popular. In some cases truth is stranger than fiction.

I thought bandwidth hogs had a name already. They were called spammers.

Unlike streaming technology that is consistent and less likely to impact other users on the same network (unless they're attempting to stream the same thing from the same sites), spam tends to be bursty and disruptive for other network users.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5191040/Astronomers-find-Milky-Way-could-taste-of-raspberries.html

I'd like to see you try to get a Microchannel card out of a system without a screwdriver. :)

He was the man considered responsible for some of the largest cuts within IBM's STG (Systems & Technology Group). A lot of programs were cut locally in order to add to the globalization effort, which is just the politically correct way of saying off-shoring. He was considered the standard bearer to what a lot of workers felt was the increased feeling of greed among the current IBM executives. A lot of good programs and people were axed during his tenure which added to the short term bottom line but have shown in the last 4 years to hurt their long term objectives. It's difficult when you ask your top performers to do more for less, until they either leave or you cast them off.

To be honest the newer ps3 slim is much more quiet than the older model, and it's a better "media station" for the purposes of streaming video from a windows machine, or just copying avi files from a DVD to the hard drive.

I think of the 360 as a gaming machine (due to the number of games) trying to be a media station, while the ps3 is a media station that tries to play games. The controls for watching videos in the ps3 are a lot nicer than the xbox.

Damn whipper snappers thinking gopher was old. :)

I remember maintaining uucp links.

"Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from failure scenarios."

Let's highlight the words that needs emphasis.

"provides", "developers", "tools"

As to whether the developers use them or not isn't always automatic.

"you can protect your applications from failure of a single location"

"can"

Highly available does not meant fault tolerance. The latter allows an application to continue functioning after a component failure. Regardless of the snake oil that has been thrown around, there is no silver bullet that can automagically enable application to be multi-node aware with no chance of deadlock or data corruption. You need to program for this. Again, tools are provided, but that doesn't mean everyone will use them. So in the absense of a fault tolerant application, the cloud provides high availability.

"A sprint (sometimes called a Code Jam or hack-a-thon) is a short time period (three to five days) during which software developers work on a particular chunk of functionality."

I've seen this usually in reference to agile programming. I've seen agile programming used, and I have seen it used badly. Sprints are time boxed units within a scrum format. They're fixed length, start and end at set times, with goals specified within that format. I don't consider "code jams" to be sprints, and it's hard for me to picture 3-5 days as an effective sprint for the newly initiated. One of the first things you're told is the effective percentage of utilization of resources who are new to the sprint, new to the team or new to scrum format is reduced. It is through the iterative process that the people become better, that means multiple sprints to improve and streamline your process. Sprints are a way to prioritize work via planning sessions at the start, and view the good, bad and ugly in the retrospective at the end.

For larger projects this means 3-4 week sprints, with continuity from 1 sprint to the next. It not only requires leadership discipline, but team discipline. It just doesn't seem to be conducive for drawing volunteer work. It isn't a magic glue that allows new people to come together to make code happen.