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Comment Re:The point of this was to get women into coding (Score -1, Troll) 107

by Elfboy (#64409216) Attached to: 'Women Who Code' Shuts Down Unexpectedly

Or the historical trash-fire toxic nature of a lot of open source projects contributes to women, PoC, and LGBT individuals just not bothering with them. Or that most women still have to perform familial duties in their off time in addition to working their full time tech jobs, so have less spare cycles to futz around.

Comment Re:HIPPA? (Score 1) 47

Calling HL7 a standards based interface is a very very large joke. It's about as 'standard' as semi-formatted XML document. Yeah you can communicate the structure, however each hospital/vendor/mapper implements where the data goes differently, hence the massive interop headaches.

While the NHL could generate their own canonical format for storage, they would still need to map it to each and every EMR they interacted with. Curious how they solved that one.

Comment They've run out of space...and this is news? (Score 5, Interesting) 234

by Elfboy (#39815143) Attached to: Apple Planning To Build Private Restaurant

Apple has a wonderful cafeteria and a seriously epic variety of food, they are just out of space (food stations are being set up outside etc...). Makes perfect sense for them to house a larger "restaurant" (aka cafeteria) so employees don't have to head out to the local BJ's. Why is this being spun as an OMG Apple is too wealthy and splurging. Yahoo and others have freaking DMV and hairstyling services for employees (okay maybe Yahoo is not the best example here....)
Games

Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story 235

Posted by Soulskill from the truth-or-dare dept.
sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project." The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.
The Almighty Buck

EA Flip-Flops On Battlefield: Heroes Pricing, Fans Angry 221

Posted by Soulskill from the put-your-money-where-your-gun-is dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

Comment Re:They are NOT hurting for funding (Score 1) 161

by Elfboy (#30168576) Attached to: EA Shuts Down Pandemic Studios, Cuts 200 Jobs

No company ever thinks to improve their bottom line by steadily generating quality product anymore. The money that goes into solid development is always the dregs of money first given to analysts and marketers.

I'm normally not a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-establishment labor-theory humanist, but things like this (especially with the oft-cited 'global economy') really and truly make me sick.

Blizzard... but they are the major exception to the rule (the Pixar of games?)

Other than that I agree completely about the 'global economy' bs. Not every job is 'cog' job despite management's wet dream fantasies to make it so....

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