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Submission + - Alex St. John: Game developers must avoid the 'wage-slave' attitude (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: "I know I’m going to offend a lot of people by saying this, but I do so with the hope that a few will wake up and shake off their mental shackles. I’ll grant that it’s been 23 years since I used an outhouse or had to hunt for dinner, but I’m still thrilled by the incredibly decadent luxury of porcelain toilets and fast food. I can’t begin to imagine how sheltered the lives of modern technology employees must be to think that any amount of hours they spend pushing a mouse around for a paycheck is really demanding strenuous work. I’ve hired thousands of people over the years and can’t help but notice the increasing frequency with which I encounter people with a wage-slave attitude toward making video games."

Comment Re:Dangerous Censorship Blindspot You People Have (Score 2) 214

by beaverdownunder (#51188847) Attached to: Twitter Says It's Beating the Trolls

There's no "free speech" on television; it's censored all the time (as a matter of course, even.) There's no "free speech" in newspapers; there's no "free speech" on the radio.

These are all commonly censored due to government regulation or when the company running the media outlet determines that broadcasting speech could be detrimental to its own interests.

How, exactly, are Facebook and Twitter any different from any other media outlet that solicits public content, then publishes what it wants? I think you're confusing what it essentially a self-publishing service with a soapbox on a streetcorner. With the latter, you generally do have free speech (within limits), with the former you certainly do not.
 

Comment Re:What a criminal (Score 5, Informative) 98

by beaverdownunder (#51170005) Attached to: Kim Dotcom Loses Extradition Case

Quoted from a comment on HN:

"Not accurate. Read the indictment.

- Bottom of page 11: thirty-nine infringing copies of copyright motion pictures were present on their leased servers at Carpathia Hosting... in the Eastern District of Virginia

- Page 18:The Mega Conspiracy leases approximately 25 petabytes of data storage from Carpathia to store content associated with The Mega Site.

- It also looks like they leased servers in the US from Cogent, Leaseweb. They paid Carpathia $13M US to host Mega files in the US.

- They also used a US-based Paypal account to receive funds and pay the different hosts in the US.

- They made "reward" payments to US residents who provided copyrighted material.

Mega was running an illegal business in the US."

Submission + - Dizzying Ride May Be Ending for Tech Start-Ups (nytimes.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: NYT: "The worth of hot technology start-ups seemed for years to go in only one direction: straight up.

Now there are signs of growing unease over the dizzying valuations of some of the most richly priced private companies.

The latest sign has emerged with one such favorite, Snapchat, being discounted 25 percent by one of its more recent investors, Fidelity, the mutual fund giant.

Another start-up, Dropbox, the widely used file storage service, was devalued by the giant asset manager BlackRock this year.

The funds’ markdowns may tap the brakes on a fast-growing market. Investors, in the hopes of getting a piece of the next Facebook or Google, have been pouring billions of dollars into young private companies."

Submission + - Mistigris releases 21st-anniversary artpack! (mistigris.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following 16 years in the wilderness, area code 604's underground computer art group Mistigris unexpectedly returned to life in October of 2015; one year later, over 50 artists (including guests from ACiD and Blocktronics) celebrate with over 100 artworks in a 216-meg artpack release including traditional textmode art (and non-traditional — PETSCII, Shift JIS, teletext and typewriter art) as well as new frontiers for artpacks: photography, painting, sculpture, digital video, and even a textile work. All that plus an hour and a half of music! Some submissions are lost & unreleased Amiga works dating to the early '90s and even late '80s, while others were made last week, but the sum of the enterprise is technologically timeless.

Comment Also, self-interest (Score 1) 300

by beaverdownunder (#50611601) Attached to: Jeff Atwood NY Daily News Op-Ed: Learning To Code Is Overrated

Also, if you asked a plumber if everyone should learn plumbing, or a mechanic if everyone should learn how to fix their car, they would similarly say no -- it's in their vested financial interest to keep the field small.

I don't know why large publications / websites keep giving these people oxygen in the face of such an obvious conflict of interest. Ask a computer science professor from a respected college if THEY think kids should learn these skills and I guarantee you'll get a different answer.

Comment It only takes a single child... (Score 1) 300

by beaverdownunder (#50611567) Attached to: Jeff Atwood NY Daily News Op-Ed: Learning To Code Is Overrated

Just like music, language skills and art, programmers benefit from learning core computer science skills in early childhood.

Sure, an adult can learn these things. Will they ever be as good? Will an adult who learns how to play violin in adulthood ever be as good as someone who learned as an adult? No.

However, we live in a technology-driven society now, and unlike where the value of the occasional child violin prodigy could be questioned, there is no question that if even one child out of the thousand who take these introductory computer science classes excels at it, the world-changing innovations they could potentially achieve make the entire exercise more than worthwhile.

Submission + - 2K, Australia's Last AAA Studio, Closes Its Doors (kotaku.com.au)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: 2K Australia, the Canberra studio that most recently developed Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, is closing its doors.

The entire studio is closing, and all staff members will lose their jobs. “All hands are gone,” said a source for Kotaku Australia.

2K Canberra was the last major AAA-style studio operating out of Australia. The costs of operating in Australia are apparently to blame for the decision.

This raises questions as to the viability of developing major video games in Australia.

Submission + - The e-voting machine anyone can hack

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away

Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts.

The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of "admin," "abcde," and "shoup" to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November's elections.

Submission + - The car that knows when you'll get in an accident before you do (fusion.net)

Submitted by aurtherdent2000
aurtherdent2000 writes: I’m behind the wheel of the car of the future. It’s a gray Toyota Camry, but it has a camera pointed at me from the corner of the windshield recording my every eye movement, a GPS tracker, an outside-facing camera and a speed logger. It sees everything I’m doing so it can predict what I’m going to do behind the wheel seconds before I do it. So when my eyes glance to the left, it could warn me there’s a car between me and the exit I want to take. More at Robot Learning lab at Cornell University and Stanford University: Brain4Cars project.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Best Strategies For Teaching Kids CS Skills? (discorunner.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: We're currently working on developing a teaching platform based around our BASIC interpreter DiscoRunner, and we would love to hear from Slashdot readers as to what methods they've used in the past to teach kids computer science concepts — which worked, what didn't, and why.

This will obviously be invaluable to us when it comes to working out the lessons that will be taught in our fight-to-save-the-world-from-evil learning environment, and we would be eternally grateful for any scraps of wisdom you could toss our way. =)

Thank you!

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