106641820
submission
Qbertino writes:
After years of work the Blender team is closing in on the 2.8 release with a Blender 2.8 Beta Version and this video showing off wide-sweeping updates and improvements on Blenders featureset, the UI and professional workflow management. As Blender continues to improve it is making more and more inroads into professional fields as a primary 3D tool in the industry, such as in the production of the feature length Netflix Movie "NextGen" made entirely in Blender by Tangent Animation, a 'Blender only' animation studio from Canada.
105493778
submission
Qbertino writes:
Distant Worlds 2 is an community organised expedition to the center of the milky way set in the SF space videogame Elite Dangerous. Whilst virtual expeditions like this have happened in the past, this one is the largest yet with more than 5000 participants enrolled for the journey across multiple gaming platforms for which elite dangerous is available. The journey is set to start on the 13th of January 2019 (year 3305 ingame) and will cover thousands of lightyears. Distant Worlds 2 is planned to take roughly 8 months in real time and include a visit to the center of the galaxy at Sagittarius A*.
102966864
submission
Qbertino writes:
The German Web industry magazine T3N (think of it as the German Techcrunch) has an article about a test circuit and a test vehicle — a modified Mercedes Benz limosine of the time — that was set up by the German tire manufacturer Continental in order to test tires in a precisely reproducable set of tests. Hence the self-driving mechanism provided by a wire in the test track to send and recieve signals from the car and to record data on the testruns on magnetic tape and other hightech stuff from the time. Here's a short video, errm, film clip showing the setup in action, driverless seat included. Todays AI is nowhere to be seen of course, but the entire setup itself seems pretty impressive and sophisitcated.
101836494
submission
Qbertino writes:
Star Ruler 2, a 4X RTS Game has been open sourced under the MIT license (code/engine) by its publisher Blind Mind Studios. The art assets are available under a CC license that prohibits commericial use. The code is available on Github, only the 64bit version has been released. Apparently the reasoning was, that the code had been lying dormant for quite some time now, with no further work being done on the codebase. Nice. Two thumbs up for this great addition to open source gaming. If you want to show your gratitude you can still by the official preconfectioned version on Steam and, better yet, Gog.
101654314
submission
Qbertino writes:
I do PHP for a living. The problem I have is the classic catch-22: PHP is used at every streetcorner which accounts for an abundance of jobs and work to do. However, I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the ignorant and clueless in the vincinity of PHP. Crappy code and baaaaad application setups is one thing, but people refusing to fix them or simply not even understanding the broader implications of bad applications or attempting SEO with gadgets while refusing to fix 3.5 MB per pagecall are just minor tidbits in a history of increasingly unnerving run-ins with knuckledragers in the "web agency" camp. My strong suspicion is, that this also correlates directly with the prominence of server-side done with PHP in these teams. Will I leave the larger part of this backwards stuff behind if I move to another server-side PL such as Java or Kotlin for professional work in the broader web area? Do I have a chance to do quality work on quality projects using PHP or are those slim compare to other PLs? In short, should I ditch PHP?
100990162
submission
Qbertino writes:
So I get that this is a somewhat religious topic somewhere up there with tabs vs. spaces and such, but I'm curious anyway: How do you maintain your dependencies and why?
I do professional web development and I maintain or at least store my own dependencies in the project. I want my projects to be runable on the spot. Push my stuff to the server, hit refresh and be up and running, doing the actual work I need to do. So fonts, JS libs, frontend toolkits, external Python or PHP stuff and such go into that project, no matter what. It may be that I have in mind only to use feature X and therefore know I'm good with just that one file in minified and delete everything else, but I don't do automated dependency management.
So far I've been doing fine with this. Actually better than some others that have to frantically look for that borked thing in their recent Grunt build or when Composer pulled some newfangled function of a remote repo that collides with the installed runtime. Or when they take two hours to set up their stuff. This is the reason I have all my stuff in my projects.
I get the notion that a lot of this dep-management stuff is being fancy for fancies sake, but I'm not quite sure. Hence this topic and general question.
How do you do it?
What's with the Java camp or — for example — when you're doing something platform specific like iOS development or something?
Looking forward to your input.
100659260
submission
Qbertino writes:
Various sources report that Alan Bean, one of the Apollo astronauts to walk the moon, has died in Houston, at the age of 86. Alan Bean retired from his work as an astronaut and became an artist painter. "The only artist to actually walk the moon" was one of his bytitles. NYT report here.
99767887
submission
Qbertino writes:
I've been doing some inroads into css grid and css flexbox development building critical products with these new standards and have reached a point where I'd generally opt to avoid CSS Frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation and such all together.
I do Webdev for a living and while I still do get the point of CSS precompilers such as SASS I also think we have moved beyond the point where a thing such as Bootstrap is useful enough to justify the dependancy.
Am I wrong? What is your take on responsive CSS frameworks in 2018? Do you still use them or are they on the way out? What are the requirements at your shop if you're doing Webdev professionally? How do you and your team approach this in 2018?
99229603
submission
Qbertino writes:
Roughly put for the kicks of it I'm doing a BsC in Media-CompSci and have to do my exams in paper-coding. I find this patently absurd in 2018. Not that I'd expect an IDE — it's an exam after all — but being able to use a screen and a keyboard with a very simple editor should be standard at universities these days IMHO. What do you think and what are your recent experiences with exams at universities? Have you needed to paper-code for an exam sometime recently? Is this still standard? What's the point despite annoying students? Did I miss something?
97165679
submission
Qbertino writes:
Heise reports (German link) that German authorities are examining loot boxes in video games and considering a legal ban of these. Loot boxes might actually even violate laws against calls-to-purchase aimed directly towards minors that are already in effect. German authorities are also checking that. ... Nice. I'm sure we all agree that no one needs loot boxes.
97160863
submission
Qbertino writes:
Due to sustained NGO, grassroots and political initiatives and raised privacy protection awareness around european members of parliament, large parts of Europe are about to get a notable boost in privacy protection for regular citizens. It's called General Data Protection Regulation.
"Datenschutzgrundverordnung", DSGVO for short, is the German name to a new Eurozone-wide set of laws being introduced in Q2 of 2018. A solid and very detailed implementation of rules that will require companies in general and internet companies in particular to follow a tracable and continuosly documented set of SOPs that ensure 100% complinace with new data protection directives that put the protection of the consumer at the center and close loopholes where in recent years to many corporations have let to much slide on the side of privacy protection.
Finaclial penalties for not complying will be raised significantly aswell — up to 20 Million Euros or 4% of global revenue for megacorps. Ouch. Experts predict an onslaught of lawsuits for any company to lazy to care and follow through, and consulting and perperation efforts are popping up left, right and center with first-movers and privacy-aware companies struggling to match the requirements ASAP that will come in May 2018.
Some U.S. links for anyone doing business in Europe here and here. Perpare for incoming says me.
95345729
submission
Qbertino writes:
This headline sounds pretty braindead and like it's written by a douche, but bear with me please. For decades I've always sought to properly model applications and entities and types and their relations. I've never over-normalised, like some academics indulge in, but I've always thought of a clean model and more-or-less strict convention over configuration as a driver for straight thinking and good design, not just in logic, but also in user experience. When NoSQL DBs became the new thing, I was quickly disappointed. Turns out, not only did they through out SQL but they also ditched relations and offloaded the remaining deperatly needed relational resulution into the app-layer.
Furthermore I've since discovered how todays professional webdevelopers building large systems speed up reading persistence by unraveling relational trails into one dataset and writing these into — curiously enough — relational database for reading/querying — because RDBs have the neat query logic with SQL.
I've also run into strange things that seem at first utterly ludicris — such as dumping entire JSON objects into single fields. Lazy and crazy it seems.
Yet right now I'm building a simple web data collection form and trying to streamline ties of front- and backend and looking for ways to avoid double work by building forms and the accompaning DB object twice and have come to realise that aside from simply analysing the stucture of the object sent and automatically building the DB table/entity based on that structure I could simply avoid the hassle entirely and just dump my incoming JSON straight to persistance, orderly serialisation be damned. With todays Web UIs doing most of the view logic on their own with no serverside prepping required, this actually could make reading the data *more* comfortable. *Lightbulb!*
In short, just this morning I've had my epiphany and finally see that ditching ER modelling entirely can atually make real sense, due to advancements in howe build applications and handle data these days.
What's your take on this? Have you noticed that modelling more quickly turns into navel-gazing and tail-chasing these days or is it just me? Is it time for uptight "ERD first, everything else second" types to overthink their prespective? And how does this look across industries? I do web, so people change their mind 5 times a day, not knowing what they want (typical web problems here), so not doing to much modelling can make sense — but what about the rest? ... You're insights and perhaps changed perspecitve on this subject requested.
94501965
submission
Qbertino writes:
For myself I've decided to test out going "all cloud". Right now I'm making all my money doing web development and am ready to drop 100 — 200 Euros per year on cloud services to move all my work into the cloud and into pipelines built entirely on cloud services (GitHub/GitLab, TravisCI, Trello, DrawIO, UXKit/Invision, Backupify, DeployHQ, etc.).
As a cloud IDE I've selected Codeanywhere, but I'm wondering if there might be better choices but I don't have time to test them all. Environments/PLs I want/need to use are Java,PHP,Node,JavaScript,TypeScript HTML and CSS. Serverside debugging for PHP,Java and Node is just about a must.
My questions: Do you have any recommendations? What are your experiences with using a cloud IDE professionally? What are your experiences with going all-cloud for professional non-trivial work? Please note that I'm based in continetal Europe, so availability here is an issue as is global fault tolerance. ... And yes, I know what I'm doing. It's a test. In 12 months I'm ready to revise everything and move back to Linux or macOS if I deem it more feasible and the better way after all. Right now I consider this cloud stuff enticing enough, big brave new brother be damned.
92198751
submission
Qbertino writes:
Strangely enough, the German authorities on written language have agreed that the until now only small-caps ligature Es-Zett (a s and a z merged together) — along with the Umlaute a standard character in the German Charset — now will get a capital companion. Rather than ditching the ligature all together, which IMHO would've been the smarter move, they agreed to enable the Es-zett to have a capital, just like every other letter in the German charset. This decision apparently also is due to enable people with a sirname starting with the Es-zett to write their name without taking the standard modern fallback, a double-s ("Ss").
Heise and the German Make Magazine have a blurb (German article, Google Translate Version) on the problems that will now arise and how they might be solved with the German standard keyboard, that as of now has no place for a capital Es-zett, since the capital for Es-zett is the question mark.
91661357
submission
Qbertino writes:
I'm about to move on in my career and having a "short rethink and regroup break" and was for quite some time now thinking about getting into perhaps a new programming language and technology, like NodeJS or Java/Kotlin or something. But I have the seriously growing suspicion that AI is coming for us programmers and IT experts faster than we might want to admit. Just last weekend I heard myself saying to a friend who was a pioneer on the web "AI is today what the web was in 1993" — I think that to very true. So just 20 minutes ago I started thinking and wondering about what types of jobs there are in AI.
Is anything popping up in the industry and AI hype and what are these positions called, what do they precisely do and what are the skills needed to do them? I suspect something like an "AI Architect", planning AI setups and clearly defining the boundaries of what the AI is supposed to do and explore. Then I presume the requirements for something like an "AI Maintainer" and/or "AI Trainer" which would probably resemble something like an admin of a big data storage, looking at statistics and making educated decisions on which "AI Training Paths" the AI should continue to explore to gain the skill required and deciding when the "AI" is ready to be let go on to the task.
You're seeing we — AFAIK — don't even have names for these positions yet, but I suspect, just as in the internet/web boom 20 years ago, that is about to change *very* fast.
And what about Tensor Flow? Should I toy around with it or are we past that stage already and will others do AI setup and installation better than me before I know how this thing really works? Because I also suspect most of the AI work for humans will closely be tied to services and providers such as Google. You know, renting "AI" as you rent webspace or subscribe to bandwidth today. Any services and industry vendors I should look into — besides the obvious Google that is?
In a nutshell, what work is there in the field of AI that can be done and how to I move into that?
Like *now*.
And what should I maybe get a degree in if I want to be on top of this AI thing? And how would you go about gaining skill and knowlege on AI today, and I mean literally, today.
I know, tons of questions but insightful advice is requested from an educated slashdot crowd. And I bet I'm not the only one interested in this topic.
Thanks.
