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Comment I learned how to manage people while playing DAOC (Score 2) 25

DAOC (Dark Age of Camelot) was a MMO back in the 2000's similar to World of Warcraft. I was in a top PvP guild on the Palomides server called Insurrection. Insurrection was only ~12 people and to properly farm for the good end game items it was necessary to link up with the other top guilds on the server. I routinely ran dragon / dungeon raids of 40-60 and learned how to coordinate large groups of people toward a set of goals and then divide the spoils (as well as keep those who didn't get loot interested in the next raids).

I used that skillset to start to manage small teams at startups, then larger teams, and finally I was running 200-500 people across several teams @ Zynga during its heyday.

Comment Re:Parents can't do no wrong (Score 2) 377

Socrates was sentenced to death because he was a humongous asshole to everyone in Athens and they finally got fed up with him.

Socrates would literally challenge people in the streets to debates and then destroy them with logic, which might be ok for the random Joe Athens fella but not to the high ranking military and political figures he liked to pick on. Eventually enough people with power got sick of being made to look foolish and had him put on trial, which he took as a total farce and continued to make fun of everyone during the trial. The whole "corrupting the youth" part of the accusations against him where just there as a reason to have the trial.

He was found guilty by jury and then during his sentencing arguments he managed to piss even more people off such that MORE JURORS VOTED TO KILL HIM THAN VOTED TO CONVICT.

So in summation, Socrates was not killed because people found something external to blame their kids behavior on. He was killed because he didn't know when to stop being a massive dick to people in power.

Comment Had this problem for years (Score 1) 565

I've had this problem for years - a prison building contractor in Africa uses my gmail address for many of his accounts payable. I get invoices all the time for toilets, timecard machines, tons of concrete, lumber, copper tubing, etc. It's actually quite interesting, and while he's gotten a few second/third notices on payments, it always seems to be get resolved.

I tried to fix the problem years ago but no one would respond, so I finally gave up trying.

Comment Just a Motorola Oncore Receiver bug (Score 3, Interesting) 187

This is the second time a bug in the firmware of Motorola Oncore GPS receivers have manifested itself. There is a bug relating to a 32 bit wide bitmap, and DoD just took the GPS satellite numbered 32 out of the constellation and that seems to be the cause. I have data for two such receivers showing the anomaly and for one different receiver seeing no trouble at all.

Comment They could off just asked me if it was legal (Score 1, Interesting) 226

...because I spent 1.5 years of my life @ MP3.com running reports and collecting data as discovery for the lawsuits of record companies, publishers, individual artists, and whomever owned any percentage of any playback rights in any country (and yes this means people who owned less that 1% of a song's rights in Turkmenistan).

Comment Re:I wouldn't cite those projects if I were you (Score 4, Interesting) 29

While I would agree with the OP that a lot of these projects target the needs of large, FB-like companies, Reactjs and Flux (Flux is a pseudo-framework for React) are really nice alternatives to heavier options like Angular and Backbone. If you're building with JS on the front end then definitely take a look; the speed advantage over Angular is ridiculous.

Comment For clarification (Score 4, Interesting) 215

2 clarifications for the summary, since I was the 10th engineer at MP3.com and worked there from 1999-2003:

- We lost to the record labels/publishers not because we gave people access to their music, but because we compiled the music library and streamed it without paying the labels/publishers any royalties. Our strategy was to buy a copy of the CD ourselves, rip it, then claim fair use doctrine when we streamed it to someone else who also owned it. This was a supposed grey area in the law that got cleared up REAL FAST in a media-friendly district court. Services that you see now are paying royalties on what they stream. MP3.com later sued its lawyers that gave the advice on the so-called "grey area" it tried to go through.

- We where not a Silicon Valley company, we where in San Diego. Perhaps if we where SV we would of gotten better legal advice :p

Comment The smell of slashdot in the morning... (Score 4, Informative) 298

What a misleading title, it is not even in the same continent as the article.

A large number of people obviously didn't read the actual article.

And I guess Knuth has quite a fanboi community on slashdot. I wonder if he really appreciates that ?

Some of those who did read the article, does not seem to know the difference between a binary heap and a binary tree, and even the pretty strong clue to the difference in the text, did not make them go check wikipedia. 10 out of 10 for selfesteem, but 0 out of 10 for clue.

Those who think CS should be unsullied by actual computers should make sure to note this belief on their resume. (Trust me, everybody you send your resume to will appreciate that.)

Those who advocate getting rid of Virtual Memory must have much more money for RAM than is sensible. I wish I could afford that.

About five comments tries, in vain it seems, to explain the point of my article to the unwashed masses (kudos!, but really, what are you doing here ?)

Not one comment rises to a level where I feel a need to answer it specifically. On Reddit over the weekend there were about a handful.

Is that really par for the course on slashdot these days ?

Sic transit gloria mundi...

Poul-Henning

First Person Shooters (Games)

Tremulous Switching To Xbox Live, Exclusively 43

An anonymous reader writes "Darklegion Development and Microsoft have apparently been working on a new version of Tremulous for the Xbox 360. Timbor, project founder and a main developer of Tremulous, said this in a recent announcement: 'What does this mean for you? You will now be able to play Tremulous on Xbox Live with thousands of other gamers, earning achievements and showing off your gaming skill. In the best interest of maintaining a steady and secure Tremulous playerbase, Tremulous is going to be exclusively available for Xbox Live. Existing infrastructure will no longer receive official support. Players who have already been playing for at least three months can apply for a €5/$7 coupon as a show of our appreciation of your enthusiasm so far! What does this mean for the community? Hopefully nothing! While the production of Tremulous switches from its current open source development to a closed source environment handled by the very capable and experienced Microsoft engineers, the efforts of the community will still be valued. In this collaboration we have made it very clear that the Tremulous community is very important to the game, and Microsoft agrees with us on this point. We are confident that this move will not stifle the creative output of the community.'"
Idle

Want a Body Piercing With That Server? 19

1sockchuck writes "The web hosting business is known for promotional gimmicks. But here's an unusual one: ServerBeach UK is offering a free body piercing with every new server ordered on April 1st. 'We were tired of the typical boring giveaways that have been done to death' said ServerBeach's Dominic Monkhouse. The stunt revives memories of earlier guerrilla marketing efforts by web hosts, like the 'human billboard' who was paid $7,000 to tattoo a hosting company's logo on the back of his head."
Science

Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64

thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
Bug

Passage of Time Solves PS3 Glitch 147

An anonymous reader writes "A quick update on the widespread PlayStation 3 glitch we discussed recently: as of last night (Monday, March 1st) the problem has resolved itself. I powered up my PS3 to find the clock was set to April 29th, 2020, but once I went into the system menu and set the date and time via the internet I got an accurate date. That seems to be the test of whether your PS3 is 'fixed' or not; Sony says you should be all set."

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