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Comment Re:I don't trust rottentomatoes as far as I could (Score 0) 115

Which is more likely? Paid shills or internet armchair warriors creating multiple accounts?

I'll give you a hint. The likelihood of clicking on a random username in the audience reviews and finding that Orville is the only show they reviewed is very high.

Also, the tomatometer is determined differently between critics and audience.

Comment You don't understand how the Tomatometer works... (Score 1) 115

Tell me you don't understand Rotten Tomatoes ratings without telling me you don't understand Rotten Tomatoes ratings...

RT uses a website's review score to assign either fresh or rotten to each review. If my website's review system is up to 5 stars, then a rating of 2.5 is deemed 'fresh' because 2.5/5 is 50% or greater. If another website uses a 0-10 scale, then 5/10 or better is considered 'fresh'.

The tomatometer adds up the 'fresh' ratings and creates a percentage from the total number of ratings. The situation with Borderlands was pretty simple. Not a single review of the 30 on the website earlier had a review that equated to 'fresh', so it had a 0%. Later in the day, more reviews came in and a few people took pity on this awful movie. There are now 89 ratings and 9% is of them have a 'fresh' rating.

Metacritic does things decidedly differently. While they still determine an average like RT, how much someone likes or doesn't like a movie factors into the final score. I can rate a movie a 2.5/5 stars (50%) and another website can rate a movie a 7/10 (70%) and our combined metacritic score would be 60% assuming ours were the only reviews.

Except, that's not the end of the story... Metacritic is more controversial since it gives popular websites and websites that produce more reviews more weight. Websites like IGN can write 'too much water' as a review and that game ends up with a metacritic score closer to their rating than to anybody else's.

Comment Re: ebay valve of the miss printed ones? (Score -1) 116

If you got a tattoo and someone misspelled text in it, would that bother you? How about a tombstone or a memorial. Would the misspelling of a family member's name bug you? I would hope so because it doesn't show a lot of respect otherwise for something that was important enough to you to put a permanent mark on your skin or to erect a tombstone for. It feels half-assed, like you're doing it for appearances rather than being genuine. It's something that was important to them. I don't get why people are being dicks about that. Do you have anything that you value for nostalgic reasons that you'd buy memorabilia for? For my uncle, it's Star Trek. Star Trek was formative in his life and influenced his career and interests. If it was misspelled Star Trebek in his memorabilia, that wouldn't fly. Have some common sense and some humility.

Comment Re: Prevention *today* via nutrition & healthy (Score 0) 45

Because your body will make glucose from other things even if you don't eat sugar. Gluconeogenesis for example makes it out of protein. Ketosis makes it out of fat. If you don't eat enough protein, your body will convert itself into glucose, starting with your muscles. Reducing sugar isn't a cure all.

Comment Understand Agile first (Score 0) 288

It helps to understand Agile to understand microservices. Agile vs Waterfall is an age-old debate. Waterfall is a development philosophy that takes a long time and you have little to show for it until the final product is completed. The idea is that you have a static set of requirements that aren't expected to change through the development lifecycle of a product. A benefit of Waterfall however is that because the scope doesn't change mid-development, Waterfall-developed applications often have fewer bugs and are completed sooner. Unfortunately, Waterfall methodology doesn't scale well, nor does it work well in environments where the target is constantly moving. Development and testing are often entirely different entities with very little overlap, hence once development is done, its often hands off from the development team. Agile is a development philosophy that focuses more on incremental successes by carving up the application into modules or goals. The idea is to modularize the application as much as possible so that the modules can easily be replaced, upgraded, and reused elsewhere and features can be developed and slotted in more easily without disrupting the rest of the application. It makes it much easier to develop for a moving target, but the cost often means the application feels like spaghetti as there are a lot of disparate, separate moving parts. It is more scalable however. Lets take for example a web application that runs a storefront. There is a web frontend, a database, a restapi and a system to upload product pictures. For scalability and redundancy, I can turn these modules into docker containers and have them work together as a solution, spinning as many of the web frontend, database, restapi, and file upload components as I need to service all four of these, which will likely each scale differently. There would also be a load balancer connecting all of these together as well and I could ensure that my containers are spread out amongst multiple servers so that I also have redundancy if one fails. Agile has become extremely prevalent in software development and the concept of microservices pairs really well with the design philosophies of Agile. For example, using Agile typically means that you have a scrum team. This team is typically made up of developers, testers and leadership that are all highly integrated with each other and have a focus on one feature or microservice at a time. The end result is that you usually have an application with at least some functioning features even if the UI isn't finalized very quickly and you can show off the work to 'users' (or stakeholders) who are often much more involved in the direction of the application than they otherwise would be in Waterfall development. Work is done in sprints (2 weeks worth of a goal) and usually end in the completion of a piece of the puzzle, but scrum teams must often bring forward unresolved bugs to the next spring (and goalpost) that quickly lose priority. For this reason, Agile-developed applications tend to be buggier.

Comment At-will employment? (Score 0) 171

Last I checked, New York is still an at-will employment state. Doesn't matter what they put in the offer letter as it likely isn't legally enforceable as at-will employment works both ways. There are a handful of exceptions, but a banker isn't a contract worker and the rest of the exceptions likely don't affect a banker either. Also, the story title 'tech workers', but the person in question is a banker. That's a stretch for sure. Kinda sus.

Comment Stuck between a rock and a hard place. (Score 1) 168

'Those who can, do; those who can't, teach'. It's a cringe-inducing phrase for me as I'm an Enterprise IT trainer for a fortune 50 company and I not only train our employees, but also our customers. I didn't get into training because I couldn't do the job. I already did the job, learned what worked and what didn't, and now I want to share what to do and what not to do with the decades of practical experience I have and continue to gain. I want those who come after me to learn from my experiences and to come in better prepared in this industry than I was so they can focus on moving the bar forward. I think this is the mentality that most instructors/trainers/educators/teachers who are passionate in their field share. These people aren't cheap though For high school and even some colleges and universities, they teach to a tightly scripted curriculum and you often have coaches teaching computer science, computer classes, and chemistry classes. It's a testament to the importance they put on their sports programs and what little importance they put on the curriculum that is supposed to ensure the students are prepared for the working world. You can't pay a real teacher with real skills the chump change they pay these folks. Even my college professors make a third or less of what I make today and lets not even talk of what the average high school teacher makes. This isn't me showing off either as most senior educators in my field make what I make. The simple truth of this is that a university can't afford us. On top of my normal job, I do sometimes do adjunct work for a university and will be a guest presenter/professor for a couple weeks at a time since there is certainly value in bringing in someone with practical experience, but they couldn't afford a dozen of me on the payroll year-round, then multiply that by every field of study at the university. Sadly, there isn't a lot they can do about this. The sports programs in the largest universities bring in revenue from tv, concessions, memorabilia and tickets to games that eclipse the money they make from tuition and these are those on the best side of this financial equation. Smaller universities however have to have fewer professors, less skilled professors, higher tuition, or focus on revenue generation from other alternative streams (like sports) or a balancing act of all of these and more to be able to stay afloat. I truthfully don't know what the right answer is as I think the moment you start getting educators with a higher level of the skillset than what is being taught, you have to redefine how the school is going to make back the money spent on those people. To ensure they stay up to snuff in their field, you will also have to pay for their continued education or somehow involve them in the field of study they do while they're employed at the college. For example. That's why schools support research and writing papers for scientific journals. Not only does it look good on the research team, but it also looks good on the school while providing the practical experience in the field. But again, lets assume chemical engineering as a field, this research work can be a net cost because of the equipment, safety, licensing, etc required. In the end, this stuff is such a balancing act from a financial perspective that it's incredibly difficult to do what this article is asking because it's not just a CS problem. It's a problem in nearly every field of study.

Comment Linux is easier today (Score 1) 77

I've been commenting about this for years, but the only thing that differentiates Windows from Linux is that Linux had (keyword) been so obtuse an OS to use as a daily driver that the average person wouldnt use it. Modern Linux distros have changed that and so now there is a greater reason for hackers, crackers and script kiddies to pay attention to Linux. Anybody remember the SSH vulnerability from a few years ago or the glibc vulnerability? These had been present for over a decade. I don't think Linux is any better. It's required level of knowledge means there are fewer people (and fewer ignorant people) using it. What kind of stupid would a ransomware creator be if they spent development time on an OS too few ignorant people are using to actually infect someone. The problem is Linux is a lot closer to becoming 'mainstream' than it was a decade ago and these vulnerabilities, malware and ransom ware will continue to get more common on Linux. Maybe we need a Linux replacement.

Comment Profit margins (Score 1) 236

It means your profit margins aren't realistic and you're a greedy and/or shortsighted fool. Most companies in this started small as startups paying people in their own country. To their customers, they gave great deals, had good support, bogo or something to make them stand out from the rest of the pack. You need a gimmick, something to avoid your company appearing to just be joining the bandwagon. Tech isn't a get rich quick scheme.

Comment Ugh...bad reporting (Score 1) 301

Was this meant to make Mueller's team look bad? The least you could do is explain what and why. They were supposed to review texts first, then wipe many phones. Some had passcodes with a limited number of input attempts on them before they self-wiped. Regarding people commenting the legality of this, these appear to be government assets. They reference asset tags, hence they were likely issued by the government for business use.

Comment I like torrentfreak, but... (Score 1) 85

'highly organized' they say. I'm a former member of a release team and that's laughable. They're giving us too much credit. There's a couple admins of an IRC channel who I send my encodes to and a qa volunteer checks it for problems and quality and then it shows up on their shared content. Most encodes are scripted with an avisynth template that I wrote then reused on pretty much everything; making minor tweaks depending on if it was animated, recorded on film or not, etc. Most 'communities' are leachers who never say a word in IRC. Maybe 5 of the 200 or so in the channel actually chat and there's no interaction between groups. It's considered taboo to rebrand another group's releases as your own. There's very little interaction between the ops/hops/qa/encoders outside of these interactions as well. Piracy is like grunge music. Grassroots with an unusually large audience.

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