This is about Doug Loverro, who resigned as director for human spaceflight a few weeks ago when this came out. The new news today is the inspector general is making a report. Basically because Mike Pence is pushing so hard for the 2024 moon landing, Doug gave Boeing advice (back in January or so) when they made a not-so-great proposal for the lunar lander, on how to meet the needs better. Whether they did anything with that advice or not, their final proposal was received so poorly it didn't even make the top three.

I honestly don't think this is a big deal. If it had been a single-source thing AND they had won, that would be huge, but three non-Boeing contenders are actually getting the money. The lesson is if you're a very senior leader and you use pushy language, your subordinates may take it more to heart than you intended (Pence's space policy is pragmatic rather than red-state-jobs-program).

I have a couple of questions about that approach.

First, is that bit of security able to be updated? If it's handled through the secure enclave, you might need to unlock the phone in order to upload a new signed firmware to the enclave, for example.

Second, once Apple makes that iOS build, who else has access to it?

It's different from the mainstream, but not new. Lots of companies have tried this in various forms. The standalone ones have all gone out of business (e.g. OnLive). The ones that are offered as part of a larger service (e.g. PlayStation Now) are plugging along with limited success.

The only novel bit of tech here is being able to pause and resume on different devices. Everything else (e.g. broadcasting, saving highlights) was offered by previous entrants. The most successful games in the world are all twitch games (e.g. Fortnite, FIFA) and latency kills the experience.

I live in downtown San Jose. I've seen plenty of RVs, almost all pretty old and shabby looking, but never a box truck.

Turns out they have been, at least in New Jersey.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

I was always paid the prevailing rate, and the other H-1Bs I've worked with get the same. Put it this way, they're able to get on the housing ladder in Silicon Valley. They're also really smart! Indian, German, Chinese, Canadian, British (like me), they've all been good colleagues. There may well be plenty of poor quality H-1Bs at outsourcing companies, but I've never worked anywhere that used them.

I've given enough job interviews in my time and have always recommended people by merit. If there were more qualified Americans applying for these jobs, they'd be getting hired. I recommended plenty of Americans and they usually worked out well. Sponsoring H-1Bs is expensive and a pain in the ass. Companies don't do that unless they have to. They also have to keep dealing with it because the time to get a green card has grown from about 3 years (when I did it 15 years ago) to over a decade in many cases.

And don't give me that ageism thing. I'm 45 and have no trouble getting hired, and neither did the older candidates I recommended. When you're growing fast you want all kinds of people, and the varied experience and attitudes they bring make everyone more productive.

I read what the guy wrote, and what she said in response. Arenanet fucked this up bigtime and I expect a lot of devs there - especially their writers - will be looking at exit strategies. There are plenty of other game companies in Seattle. They will contact Arenanet employees and attempt to poach them.

Jessica Price wrote this long, nuanced article about the way to make the player feel they are participating in the world without breaking the way players project their own personality into their characters. In MMOs (I've worked on two) your character is an avatar; it's yourself in the virtual world. It's not like most games where you're operating an already defined character.

The guy (Deroir I think is his name) replied to this with a suggestion so insultingly simple it deserved scorn. He was polite, but it was a REALLY condescending response. Imagine you drive a truck on a really tricky route and write about all the things you contend with. You've been doing this successfully for years. Then someone says, politely, but meaning to educate you, "if you turned the wheel and used the gas at the same time, how about that?" That's a thing deserving only scorn.

She unloaded on him pretty hard, but it was the right way to nip that idiocy in the bud. If she hadn't most likely a whole bunch of other people would've chimed in with similar stupidity. Arenanet management immediately fired her, plus a colleague who had made a few mild comments in support of her.

Bottom line; your staff are the most important thing you have. If you throw talented long-time staff members to the wolves, you stand a good chance of wrecking your relationship with your staff. Everybody else will see that as ruthlessness and feel fear!

Personally I will now never even consider working with Arenanet's leadership and other devs I know are saying the same thing. That the guy has some sort of business relationship with Arenanet only makes it worse; Now every time the company signs a deal with someone the staff will wonder if that person will endanger their career. The game biz is cut-throat; a little self-inflicted wound can have major effects. Arenanet are probably going to suffer the consequences in an ugly way.

If this is being done for research, is there a link to the review board and/or the organisation gathering the data?

Nice sig. Clever way of obfuscating it.

This is my experience too. I'm at a company with lots of late-20s engineers, but there's a cadre of older people like me (I'm 44). We bring a different sensibility to the team and thus diversity of ideas and techniques. There's a synergy that improves the output of all the engineers.

If you can show your programming chops on a whiteboard, that you're good at learning new things and that you have the drive to get things done when everyone else is working extra hours the smarter companies will pick you up at least in Silicon Valley. Those smarter companies are usually looking to keep the number of extra hours down, because they want to keep their good staff. There are loads of mediocre programmers here of all ages; beat their skills and doors can still open.

Google did exactly the right thing. This guy wrote something that it was obvious would piss off a LOT of people, did it using work resources and work hours and published it anonymously which meant it would be more notorious and there would be a bunch of extra effort spent to find out who wrote it.

If Google had given their tacit approval for this activity by not firing him, it would've opened the door for more people to do the same thing, for investor lawsuits, for boycotts and I'm sure other things that would impact their bottom line. In other words, the most economically rational and least risky thing to do is to fire him.

Wanting foreign workers to leave the country by fearing they'll be shot seems to meet that definition to me.

Careful who you call noob...

I managed to get one of those guys to talk to me "honestly" for a while. He started his patter and I said I knew this was a ransomware scam. I politely asked what his plans in life were.

We played a little guessing game about where they're based, since the accent is obviously Indian-subcontinent. Took me a couple of tries, but the answer is Sri Lanka. I suggested he learn to program if he wanted to have a more successful career.

The next time one of them called I asked how the weather was in Columbo that evening and blew his mind a little bit.

GPUs and CPUs keep getting faster and faster. It won't be long before phones come with better silicon than a PS4/Xbox One. Two refreshes of iMac or Macbook and they'll be good enough for VR. Luckey's right that there's no point doing anything before then of course.