What a loss to the community, and to his family. Thanks for the good times and /. memories, roblimo.

I've used Matlab academically for about half a year now, and that most anybody (but for scientists and mathematicians operating solely on huge numeric matrices, maybe) uses it is rather shocking to me. The only good thing I can really say about Matlab is that it's made me a better programmer in _other_ languages. Sometimes when you're forced to do something so horribly wrong, the right way of doing it leaps out at you. It's like being forced to ride a unicycle, and suddenly realizing why the motorcycle was invented. Not to say that it doesn't have some very advanced features; it's not a simple beast by any means and -can- do some amazing stuff, but it seems to do them so.. weirdly, and often ridiculously slowly, that it's got that crufty feeling of legacy software with stuff just stapled on all over it.

I'm hopeful about http://www.julialang.org/ the Julia language project and think it's worth at least keeping an eye on in the future.

There are an awful lot of comments here from guys sound pretty angry at a female having the audacity to not like rape and death threats for being online and visible, railing against "feminism" and the such. That's not really a community that I really care to be a part of.

Sex crimes are a real thing, and they're scary as hell. Yeah, people tend to talk big and spout crap that they'll never, ever go through with when cloaked behind anonymity of the net, but that doesn't make it any less scary to the recipient, to the point of downright horrifying when received over and over and over and over again. It's a completely legitimate complaint. I can't imagine, I don't -want- to imagine, being in that position myself. Nobody should have to put up with that, and asking the guys perpetuating this to tone it the fuck down is utterly reasonable.

Yes, actually.
(Link to paper.)

Did anybody else catch this little line near the bottom?

"Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free?"

"Tinkering" with the brain? Really? Citizen, please report to Attitude Adjustment Center for Rehabilitation. I'm more terrified of someone deciding to fundamentally alter the biological basis for who I am as a person, than I am of being locked up for the rest of my life. Sure, it's a great deterrent by fear, but that's not the kind of society I want to live in, myself.

I've seen this happen.

My supervisor wrote some software at my old workplace that seriously streamlined the things we did because we were doing so much bullshit on pen and paper it was ridiculous, and soon this piece of software became critical not just for the actual work but for a timeclock and a dozen other functions. He was not in a programming position; he used his personal experience to create the software far beyond his pay grade and position. The off-site executives had no idea about it for a long time; when the suits found out about the software they took it over. When he resisted the process, the political machine kicked in and he was fired/forced to resign. A nightmareish third-party development house took over the app in theory - and proceeded to not do a damn thing with it.

Worse for us who were left - code maintenance went into a limbo that left us using a piece of software unable to evolve with our workflow needs. It degraded over time until it was barely useable at all; none of the many bugs and features that had been on his "to-do" list were left unattended. But by that point we were tied to this software. We'd have had to go back in time and redesign our entire previous paper-based process from scratch, losing really tremendous time and productivity in an already tough contracted environment. It was a total nightmare. I eventually left the company and I have no idea what happened after that, except that I know my project has long since been essentially closed anyways.

So: work it out ahead of time with your bosses that you might be interested and do not, do NOT, DO NOT let them know that you've written a SINGLE line of code while under their employ. There's a good chance they'll try to simply take it from you. Even if it's not in your contract, they may still try to make a claim. Even if you think they're cool, even if your boss is your bro. Get any deals, compensation, or stipulations worked out on paper ahead of time if you don't want to simply hand them your work for a fraction of what it's worth. And consider the life cycle of your software, and how it will impact the company and people who use it as a whole.

Yes, we care. The magnetosphere both affects radio propagation and protects us from solar radiation. Since I guess I'm the only person on /. left who's over age 12, let me remind you of the major blackout that happened in 1989 from a solar flare that pounded right through what geomagnetic protection we've got. It killed some satellites, iirc, and fried a large chunk of the canadian power grid. The magnetosphere is useful and interesting, and knowing how it works can at least prepare us to... look forward to any coming apocalypse... Hmm.

Aside from that, some re-figuring of how propagation works to take advantage of this new layer for long-range radio communication may occur, if possible. It could result in a new something to bounce radio waves off of, and that's always exciting.

Either way, it gives us data about our environment.

So yes, yes we do care, because we care about SCIENCE! *finger thrusting into the air*

Otherwise, no, feel free to not give a shit. :D

I did enjoy Dead Space a fair amount. I felt like they actually pulled off the camera perspective better than just about any other game that's tried it, the combat was pretty fun and the weapons were fairly unique and handled in interesting ways. The basic plasma cutter's vertical/horizontal switch was really neat.

It was also really quite a gorgeous environment, and came with an interesting backstory - that unfortunately really had no bearing on the actual fetch-and-shoot gameplay. The interface was also genius, and lots of interesting things to look at and listen to. The suit "powers" were fairly neat, though could've used maybe a little more "explaining", because some folks didn't seem to understand that the industrial suits were equippable with these as a matter of course, turning every worker into a sort of walking forklift with the levitator and able to do maintenance on fast-moving equipment without a total shutdown with the slow-beam. A little unusual, but plausible enough for me to think about as an interesting technological side-path.

What got me, though, was the extreme bowing to horror convention - after about 20 minutes of playing I could point to every single place a "scare" was going to happen. "Gee, I wonder if I turn around right here, if something's going to jump out at *BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMSPLAT* me. Oh, would you look at that." It got old real quick if you've ever seen a horror movie in your life. Like clockwork, every vent that would "feel right" for a trap? Bad guy pops out. Every enclosed space? Gee, "alien life form warning lockdown" coming. Repetitive, predictable, over and over. The alien variety wasn't bad, but I'd also expected even more than I did. It only came down to a few types most of the time. Though admittedly gruesome and pretty well-designed types. But for a game that touted aliens are being sort of random mutations of dead flesh, they were less random than I would've hoped.

And while there were new and pretty environments to go to, the rest of the gameplay pretty much just consisted of "Oh my god we're all going to die if you don't go find the thing and bring it here! OH NO! NOW THE OTHER THING IS MISSING! Oh my god we're all going to die if you don't go find the thing and bring it here! OH NO! NOW THE OTHER OTHER THING IS MISSING!" ... et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

*****Spoiler alert for the coming paragraph*****
And the bit with the "oh sigh everything's ok now, time to let the guard down OH MY GOD MONSTER CHICK IN THE COCKPIT LURCHING AT THE SCREEN CUT TO BLACK" - how generic can we get? I mean, seriously. Try a *little* harder for us, OK? We've only seen this style of ending in about every other horror flick or game ever made since the beginning of horror flicks. The plot as a whole, in fact, is so weak that it can be summed up extremely briefly: Stop the stupid space religion turned death cult that wants to impose its vision of rapture on everyone. It feels like they took a half-hour concept and stretched it out to about 8 hours, which is about 4 hours after I started getting the feeling of "been there, done that". Don't even get me started on the upgrade item collection and money system, generic spawn of a thousand survival horror titles. I did like the node system, though, in that it reminded me of the final fantasy X sphere grid system dumbed down. I may have been one of about 8 people who enjoyed the sphere grid, though.
*****End spoiler*****

In all, it was a decent title but afterwards I left it with a bit of a dusty feeling in my mouth, like it was a great concept but.. unfinished. And with the ending above I mentioned, I'm still unsure if I'm looking forward to a sequel, unless they use it as a springboard into something really more innovative story-wise. It kind of made me mad that they thought they could even get away with that.