The suburbs in America aren't actually nice. Next time you fly somewhere, look out the porthole during takeoff and approach. For the first 10 minutes, you'll mostly be flying over the suburbs. Give them a good look. Tell me they look nice.

Most (all?) the US suburbs I've spent time in are just sprawl after sprawl. The reason people prefer suburbs with kids is because everyone is so paranoid that their child will be kidnapped or kill themselves if left to their own devices, that people like to build fenced in play areas for their children to inhabit. That, and many of the city schools aren't as good because the people who care most about good schools think city schools are bad. So, the people who would improve the schools in the city move to the suburbs to improve those schools and the people who are left don't care as strongly.

Meanwhile, suburbs are bad for your health. People who live in cities walk much more. People in suburbs don't. People in suburbs spend much more time in traffic (trying to get to their job in the city).

And, probably most importantly, in America, a suburban house is seen as a status symbol. I've never lived in Europe, but it seems to me that massive homes are not seen as being such a primary objective to life there as they are in the states.

No it's not. A virtual machine does...you know...virtual things. A stack is not a virtual thing, it's just a call stack. If your C malloc call gives you a direct buffer of memory on the actual hardware, that's a non-virtual call. If your A + B operation does an add in the ALU, that's a nonvirtual call. If the calls to the underlying assembly are all done at compile time, you are using a nonvirtual language. If the calls to the underlying machine are done by a virtual machine at runtime, then you're using a virtual machine.

Java uses a virtual machine. C does not. It's really that simple.

I am a programmer, and I work in a union. It's actually quite nice, and it floors me that so many people have convinced themselves it's a bad thing. Here's what we get.

1) Overtime pay. It's not as good as regular overtime pay, but it is greater than your base hourly rate, and it does discourage your employer from working you overtime unless they honestly need it. I have currently negotiated with my manager a base schedule of only 35 hours a week; not common but I have known several people working similar schedules.
2) Scheduled annual pay raises. Not huge raises, usually in the ballpark of 2%-7%, but very respectable raises and everyone in the union gets them.
3) Protections with regard to leave. E.g. things like parental leave and other leave of absences.
4) Above average health insurance. My wife works for the state, and my insurance is better than hers. Take that for what you want.

What we don't get. Our offices generally suck. This is probably more an issue of this being an older company with older office buildings, rather than having anything to do with the union. The union could negotiate working conditions, but as our union is spread out among a great number of building sites, it's not a uniform concern. Also, the union doesn't negotiate for hiring standards.

H1B is a problem, but I don't believe it's the type of problem people think it is.

It's essentially indentured servitude. People come in, and it's not like they are here because they have skills and so long as they can remain employed they get to stay. They are basically at the behest of the company who brought them in. That company grinds on them for a time (which due to the high pay compared to back home is still a good deal usually for the employee), and then sends them back to wherever for fresh blood. Those people go back home and now suddenly they are direct competitors who we have trained.

If we have a shortage of workers in a sector, I see nothing wrong with immigration. In deed, as a US citizen, I hope we encourage the very best and brightest from all over the world to come here. I just want those people to stay and contribute for decades to come.

No 3 letter acronym is unique. At best, it's unique in the domain you are currently working in.

Not an MMORPG player here, but everything you wrote sounds like madness to me. Games are supposed to be fun, not work, and if someone told me I need to dedicate 100 hours a week to some endeavor to have fun at it (as your post implies), I would tell them to get lost.

The real I have problem with these kinds of games is that the majority of the time spent in game isn't developing skill at the game, it's developing the avatar. If I'm really good at Street Fighter, I don't need a leveled up character to win matches. I win because I'm more skilled. In WoW, I mostly win because I've got an Infinity Sword of No Recourse or whatever.

I get that grinding is part of the RPG tradition. I've done it at times in other games, but always as a secondary part of some other objective. E.g. I want to beat this guy, and my characters are too weak, so I'll grind for 45 minutes. When I have to do that, it's the WORST part of that game. I will never understand the appeal of a game where most of the gameplay is arranged around grinding.

I was going to make almost this exact statement. For me the number is 2.5. I can also explain why.

Any programming task consists of basically 3 aspects: make the prototype, make the prototype usable, make the usable thing a product (documentation, etc). In my software dev class, they had a little chart that looked like a square. The prototype took time x, and it took 3x to move in either of the other two directions, 9x to do it all.

As coders, we tend to base our estimate on the prototype part. How long will it take to do this thing once. We tend to ignore the other two aspects of producing a product from our prototype. If your organization demands the fully documented stable product, use 9x, if it demands less than that, use a smaller multiplier.

Why do I use 2.5x instead of 3? Because I'm a little bit cautious in my initial estimate, and I find 2.5x is actually closer for me.

No it's not. The difference is publishing costs. It used to be that it cost serious money to publish even a garbage game. You'd have to get licensed from Nintendo or Sony or Sega or whoever. Now, you can distribute an absolutely terrible game through Apple or Google stores for essentially nothing.

However, if you look at only consoles, you're probably right. The ratio of great to garbage on the old NES was probably pretty similar to the PS3.

If you want a story, watch a movie. If you want a rich story, read a novel. If you looking to games for your "story needs", you're doing it wrong. I recognize people on her get agitated about "games as art", but if you're looking for art from other domains copied directly into games, then it's not actually art. It's just derivative schlock.

Also, branching story options are generally a waste of the developers time. Many players don't finish a game even once. Of the people who do, some reduced fraction will play the game through a second time. Or a third. Or a fourth...

That kind of depends on how large of a space it covers. 640x360 is terrible if you were to cover an entire wall with just that many "pixels". It's not such a bad thing if you were to make it real small, like say the size of an eyeball.

An API tells you exactly the limits of what you can code. Not telling people what they can/can't do with that API is actually kind of the point.

Double wow, it's like you don't even know what a union is. A union is nothing more (and nothing less) than a method for employees to enact the same bargaining pressure that the employer has. Which is why employers hate unions. They don't want anyone else to have the same leverage they do in contract negotiations, because then they end up paying more.

There are plenty of thing you can fault unions for. They are no more perfect as a class than CEOs. Sometimes they play a hand that is weaker than they realize and can push a company out of business. Of course, so can management. But in the grand scheme of things, there is probably no single concept in history that has done more to improver worker conditions and compensation than unions, all while staying more or less within the bounds of what constitutes free market capitalism.

Side note. The 1980s ushered in the "great" era of union busting and bashing in America. Is there any correlation between that and the more recent realization that living standards for the bottom 90% stagnated and are now falling while corporate profits are at all time highs? Yes, many other things have happened (globalization chiefly), but if you asked a pro-union person what would happen if we close down unions, I suspect they would have predicted something very like what we see today.

It's poetic in a way how just about the least valuable thing you could do for society is one of the most uniformly lucrative.

It's early still for the 20 hour work week to be standardized. But it's not too early for the 35 hour week to become normative. That's what I work, and it's fantastic. I just wish my wife could have the same schedule.

And really, in the tech industry wouldn't it be great if just the 40 hour work week became normative? Too many people are working 50 or 60 hours a week. If unemployment in the sector weren't at 2%, this would be a travesty.

It's actually more than that. In order to learn something, you have to already basically know it.

University education teaches you the subject once. When you reach a point in your career (perhaps 15 years) later where you need to use that subject material, you already mostly know it. You just don't fully know it. Suddenly, a subject that took you 1 hour a day 5 days a week for 3 months to learn is something you can (mostly) relearn in perhaps one 8 hour day.

Even when you don't remember something...you do.