Search Results

Search found 2729 results on 110 pages for 'curious apprentice'.

Page 56/110 | < Previous Page | 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63  | Next Page >

• Did Microsoft designers got their butts kicked 3 years ago?

  - by John Conwell

  This is something I've been wondering about for about a year now.  Microsoft has a history of creating very useful products, with lots of useful features.  But useful does not mean usable.  A lot of stuff coming out of Redmond the past 10 years don't really seem to have been well thought out from a user design point of view.  Lots of extra steps, lots of popup windows...very little innovative thinking going on about the user experience of these products.But about a year ago I started seeing changes in the new products coming out of Microsoft.  Windows 7 is a good example of a big change.  They really got their asses handed to them on Vista, so they had to make a change.  But it looks like this change in philosophy has bled over to other areas.  The new Office (2010) lineup has a lot of changes in it to make it way more usable. Given that big changes like this take about 3 years to go from start to actually shipping product, I'm curious what happened internally at Microsoft that really drove this change in product design.  I think that Microsoft got so focused on just adding new functionality for so long, they forgot about the little things that can really make or break a product.  Office 2010 is full of these little things that make it much nicer to use.  I just hope its not too late for them.

  Read the article

• Creating a retro-style palette swapping effect in OpenGL

  - by Zack The Human

  I'm working on a Megaman-like game where I need to change the color of certain pixels at runtime. For reference: in Megaman when you change your selected weapon then main character's palette changes to reflect the selected weapon. Not all of the sprite's colors change, only certain ones do. This kind of effect was common and quite easy to do on the NES since the programmer had access to the palette and the logical mapping between pixels and palette indices. On modern hardware, though, this is a bit more challenging because the concept of palettes is not the same. All of my textures are 32-bit and do not use palettes. There are two ways I know of to achieve the effect I want, but I'm curious if there are better ways to achieve this effect easily. The two options I know of are: Use a shader and write some GLSL to perform the "palette swapping" behavior. If shaders are not available (say, because the graphics card doesn't support them) then it is possible to clone the "original" textures and generate different versions with the color changes pre-applied. Ideally I would like to use a shader since it seems straightforward and requires little additional work opposed to the duplicated-texture method. I worry that duplicating textures just to change a color in them is wasting VRAM -- should I not worry about that?

  Read the article

• Good Freelance models for web developers

  - by Matthew Underwood

  I am a web developer with four years of experience in PHP, MYSQL and experience in Javascript etc. One day I hope to develop a freelance career in web development. Areas of freelance that I am thinking of going towards includes Wordpress, Magento development along with bespoke applications. I am also thinking of doing some consultancy work for clients and businesses when I build up some more experience and technical knowledge. I want to offer a web development service to potential clients that plays on my strengths in what I know but most importantly has a market. Web development can cover so many subjects that its difficult to pick out the areas that have demand. I am also curious to find out if web developers offer services that bring in a monthly income e.g application maintenance or database maintenance? Is there a market for certain areas like WordPress plugins or bespoke applications? Are there certain things to avoid because of work duration, unrealistic client expectations or the fact that its impossible to find a market for it? As professional and experienced freelance web developers have you learned some important do's and don'ts? Is there certain services that the majority of web developers offer because its in high demand? This is the one area of web development freelancing that I cant get my head around. I know there is never a definitive answer but there must be some good practises and general consensus on this subject. Web designers design websites they offer a lump sum and get paid monthly sometimes to add new content, PPC and SEO consultants market sites to the top this will involve monthly payments, web development doesn’t seem so clear cut.

  Read the article

• Gimpshop 2.8. Available for Win & Mac. No Linux version?

  - by Jorge M. Treviño

  Finally got around to upgrading 12.04 to 12.10. One of the nice things about the new version is that Gimp 2.8 is in the repositories. Installed and it's a far cry from the 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 versions which were —at least from my untrained point of view– next to unusable. Now 2.8 is a much more intuitive, for Photoshop users at least, and I'm trying to really learn it. Browsing around, I found that there's s new version of Gimpshop, something that was a sorely amateurish attempt to a PS interface over an old Gimp version and sure to mess up your system. Seeing "2.8" prominently displayed in the page, I decided to try the Windows version. Oddly, there's a Mac version too but no Linux one. The link directs one to a non-existent file in one of the cloud storage sites. After the Win version was installed, I fired it up and, surprise!, it's exactly the same as I can tell without diving into menus and dialogs, as the plain vanilla Ubuntu version I have installed. Can anybody shed light on what goes on here? Is this a scheme to get inadvertent users to install some "optional extras" that come with the installer? Very curious about it (thanks God I'm not a cat ).

  Read the article

• What are the boundaries of the product owner in scrum?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  In another question, I asked about why I feel scrum turns active developers into passive developers, and it seems that the overall problem is not scrumy (related to scrum), and rather it's related to the bad implementation of scrum. So, here I have some questions about the scope of the responsibilities of PO (product owner) and the limitations he/she shouldn't pass. Should PO interfere the UI design, when there are designers at work in scrum team? (an example of this which has happened to us, is to replace checkboxes with a drop down list with two items, namely, yes and no; or to make some boxes larger, or to left-align some content instead of centering them on the page, or stuff like that). If yeah, to what extent? Colors? Layout? Should PO interfere in Design and architecture of coding? This hasn't happened to us yet, but I'm really curious about the boundaries. For example does PO has the right to change the platform (moving from ASP.NET MVC to PHP, or something like that), or choosing the count of servers (tier architecture), etc. Should PO interfere in validation mechanisms? For example, this field should be required, or we don't need to get this piece of information from user. Sometimes, analyzers and designers confirm that something can be handled behind the scene, like extracting the user profile info from another source, instead of asking for it in UI. How granular could/should PO get into the analysis and design? For example, a user story might be: "As a customer, I'd like to be able to buy new domains online". However, scrum team can implement this user story in a wizard of five steps, or in one single page. To which level PO should monitor, or govern, or supervise the technical analysis, design, and implementation? I asked these questions to judge whether our implementation is right or wrong?

  Read the article

• Is there a design pattern for chained observers?

  - by sharakan

  Several times, I've found myself in a situation where I want to add functionality to an existing Observer-Observable relationship. For example, let's say I have an Observable class called PriceFeed, instances of which are created by a variety of PriceSources. Observers on this are notified whenever the underlying PriceSource updates the PriceFeed with a new price. Now I want to add a feature that allows a (temporary) override to be set on the PriceFeed. The PriceSource should still update prices on the PriceFeed, but for as long as the override is set, whenever a consumer asks PriceFeed for it's current value, it should get the override. The way I did this was to introduce a new OverrideablePriceFeed that is itself both an Observer and an Observable, and that decorates the actual PriceFeed. It's implementation of .getPrice() is straight from Chain of Responsibility, but how about the handling of Observable events? When an override is set or cleared, it should issue it's own event to Observers, as well as forwarding events from the underlying PriceFeed. I think of this as some kind of a chained observer, and was curious if there's a more definitive description of a similar pattern.

  Read the article

• Questions for Oracle GlassFish and Middleware Executives

  - by arungupta

  GlassFish Community Event is planned, as part of JavaOne, on Sep 30, 2012. If you are involved in the GlassFish community, this is a perfect opportunity to engage with the Oracle GlassFish Team. Agenda 11:00 - 11:05: Introduction 11:05 - 11:30: Roadmap and Community Updates 11:30 - 12:15: Q&A with Executive Speaker Panel from Oracle and the GlassFish Team 12:15 - 01:00: Customer Testimonials Location: Moscone West, Room 2005 One of the highlights of the event is a speaker panel with executives from Oracle GlassFish and Middleware. This will be your chance to ask tough questions and expect a honest and frank answer from them. If you are attending JavaOne, then you can register for the Community Event and ask the questions in person. However, if are you are not attending the conference then we would still like give you an option to ask your questions. Are you excited, nervous, curious, confused, thrilled about the future of Java EE, GlassFish, and in general about middleware at Oracle ? This is your chance to leave a comment on this blog with your question. We'll pick some of the questions and ask them for you. And then post a response after the conference. Have you registered for JavaOne ?

  Read the article

• New college grad, psychology major, wants to code professionally. Should I get Sun Java-certified?

  - by Anita

  I just graduated from a fairly well-known liberal arts college in May. Interestingly, I majored in psychology, with a concentration in social psychology. In college I took Intro to Computer Science and hated it (used to blame it on myself; now I blame it on the professor :) However, I've always wanted to be a programmer, and finally got my wish by getting hired by a company that was willing to let me learn coding from scratch in exchange for low pay. Well, what do you know, I just got laid off this morning, and need a new job by November to pay the bills. I loved the coding part of my job at the company, and managed to learn enough Java to feel competent in the job and curious to learn more. I think my goal now is to become a professional programmer. I still know very little (never used Swing, for example) but nothing that a good book can't fix. That's the background anyway; sorry for the rambling - I'm still in shock from the layoff :( It seems to me the quickest way to get noticed by companies, without a CS degree, is by getting certification. I'm halfway through studying for the SCJP and can probably sit for an exam in a week or two. Am I right in my assumption that certs will help in my case? And in general, do I have a bat's chance in hell of making it against formally trained programmers? My assets are really just raw intelligence and intense curiosity; well, maybe a love for problem-solving too. Thanks all - feel free to edit/tag the post!

  Read the article

• Is Intellisense faster in Visual Studio 2012 compared to Visual Studio 2010 for C++ projects?

  - by syplex

  We switched to VS2010 from VS2003 a few months ago, and there are many many improvements. But the speed of Intellisense is not one of them (although it does generate higher quality results, which is great). I read that Intellisense and the MSDN help system were being improved in VS2012, so I'm curious if its actually faster? The only data I could find were graphs of an early release (VS2011). For the record, I am using a vanilla install of VS2010 with SP1 on Windows 7 SP1 (x64). No plugins or add-ins running. What I'm looking for specifically: Has the speed of intellisense autocomplete improved? Has the speed of F12 (goto definition) improved? The answers to these questions will help in determining if VS2012 is worth the money to upgrade at this time as the intellisense slowness would be the only major reason for upgrading. I'd also be interested in knowing if the help system has improved. I'm currently using MSDN help from VS2008SP1 because it has filtering and is faster.

  Read the article

• Is defining every method/state per object in a series of UML diagrams representative of MDA in general?

  - by Max

  I am currently working on a project where we use a framework that combines code generation and ORM together with UML to develop software. Methods are added to UML classes and are generated into partial classes where "stuff happens". For example, an UML class "Content" could have the method DeleteFromFileSystem(void). Which could be implemented like this: public partial class Content { public void DeleteFromFileSystem() { File.Delete(...); } } All methods are designed like this. Everything happens in these gargantuan logic-bomb domain classes. Is this how MDA or DDD or similar usually is done? For now my impression of MDA/DDD (which this has been called by higherups) is that it severely stunts my productivity (everything must be done The Way) and that it hinders maintenance work since all logic are roped, entrenched, interspersed into the mentioned gargantuan bombs. Please refrain from interpreting this as a rant - I am merely curious if this is typical MDA or some sort of extreme MDA UPDATE Concerning the example above, in my opinion Content shouldn't handle deleting itself as such. What if we change from local storage to Amazon S3, in that case we would have to reimplement this functionality scattered over multiple places instead of one single interface which we can provide a second implementation for.

  Read the article

• Inheriting projects - General Rules? [closed]

  - by pspahn

  Possible Duplicate: When is a BIG Rewrite the answer? Software rewriting alternatives Are there any actual case studies on rewrites of software success/failure rates? When should you rewrite? We're not a software company. Is a complete re-write still a bad idea? Have you ever been involved in a BIG Rewrite? This is an area of discussion I have long been curious about, but overall, I generally lack the experience to give myself an answer that I would fully trust. We've all been there, a new client shows up with a half-complete project they are looking to finish and launch. For whatever reason, they fired their previous developer, and it's now up to you to save the day. I am just finishing up a code review for a new client, and in my estimation is would be better to scrap what the previous developers built since and start from scratch. There's a ton of reasons why I am leaning toward this way, but it still makes me nervous since the client isn't going to want to hear "those last guys built you a big turd, and I can either polish it, or throw it in the trash". What are your general rules for accepting these projects? How do you determine whether it will be better to start from scratch or continue with the existing code base? What other extra steps might you take to help control client expectations, since the previous developer may have inflated those expectations beyond a reasonable level? Any other general advice?

  Read the article

• Algorithm to use for shop floor layout?

  - by jkohlhepp

  I ran into a classroom problem yesterday (business oriented class, not computer science) and I found it interesting from an algorithmic perspective. The problem goes something like this: Assume there is a shop floor with N different rooms, and you have N different departments that need to go in those rooms. The departments and the rooms are all the same size, so any department could go in any room. There is a known travel distance from each room to each other room. There is also a known amount of trips necessary from one department to another (trips are counted the same regardless which room they originate from, so a trip from A to B is equivalent to a trip from B to A). Given those inputs, determine a layout of departments into rooms which minimizes travel time. What is the best way to approach this problem algorithmically? Is there already a particular algorithm or class of algorithms designed to solve this type of problem? Does this type of problem have a name in computer science? I am not looking for you to design an algorithm to solve this, although feel free to do so if you would like. I'm wondering if this is a problem space that has already been well defined and studied algorithmically and if so get some links to research further. I can see a lot of different data structures and algorithms that might apply to this and I'm curious which approach would be "best". And don't worry, you are not doing my homework for me. This is not a homework problem per se, as this is a business course and we were simply discussing the concepts and not trying to solve the problem algorithmically.

  Read the article

• Why is it that software is still easily pirated today?

  - by mohabitar

  I've always been curious about this. Now I wouldn't call myself a programmer yet, but I'm learning, so maybe the answer to this is obvious. It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy then a "serial number/activation key". I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. I guess my question is: can there exist a fool proof and hack proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, how about theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, hackers can always find a way around it? EDIT: So apparently, the answer is no. There's pretty much no way. And so I'm sure these big companies have realized this as well. Should they adopt another sales model rather than charging a crapload for their software (I know its justified and they put a lot of hard work into their software, but its still a lot of money). Are there any alternative solutions that will benefit both the company and the user (i.e. if you purchase our product, we'll apply $X dollars to your account that will apply to future purchases from our company)?

  Read the article

• Inheriting projects - General Rules?

  - by pspahn

  This is an area of discussion I have long been curious about, but overall, I generally lack the experience to give myself an answer that I would fully trust. We've all been there, a new client shows up with a half-complete project they are looking to finish and launch. For whatever reason, they fired their previous developer, and it's now up to you to save the day. I am just finishing up a code review for a new client, and in my estimation is would be better to scrap what the previous developers built since and start from scratch. There's a ton of reasons why I am leaning toward this way, but it still makes me nervous since the client isn't going to want to hear "those last guys built you a big turd, and I can either polish it, or throw it in the trash". What are your general rules for accepting these projects? How do you determine whether it will be better to start from scratch or continue with the existing code base? What other extra steps might you take to help control client expectations, since the previous developer may have inflated those expectations beyond a reasonable level? Any other general advice?

  Read the article

• Small-scale database options for .NET

  - by raney

  I have a .NET 4.0/WPF based application I've developed and maintain for my company that acts as a friendly GUI central-point-of-information, combining information pulled from a couple of SQL databases, as well as CSV exports from a few other applications. I would like to build out my own database to support the entirety of the information that the application accesses, so that I could have a service running on my server that would read in necessary remote SQL info and file exports, to provide the user's application with a single database to connect to, as well as to remove all of the file handling currently involved in the program (copying new CSV resources from network location, reading them into memory each launch.) I have complete control and flexibility here as long as the user's experience isn't affected, and this is as much a learning experience as it is tidying up. Caveat being, I don't have much in the way of a budget. Right now I recognize my options to be: SQL Express - I'm comfortable with the server setup, I like ADO.NET and LINQ to SQL. I feel that I have the least to learn here, but it would let me focus on SQL in a familiar environment. Perhaps in conjunction with Entity Framework? MongoDB - I don't know a whole lot about, but I've heard the name enough to make me curious. Brief research seems friendly enough, and there is .NET support. I like working with open source projects. My questions are: What's popular and extensible right now? I'm not far from starting to job-hunt, and I'd like this project to be relevant going forward. What am I missing? Pros, cons? Other options? What plays well with .NET? What are the things I should be considering, the questions I should be asking, when making a decision like this? Thanks for your time.

  Read the article

• Efficient mapping layout in 2D side-scroller, and collisions between character and the world

  - by Jack

  I haven't touched Visual Studio for a couple months now, but I was playing a game from the '90s toady and had an epiphany: I was looking for something what i didn't need, and I wasn't using what I knew correctly. One of those realizations was collision, so let me tell you a bit about my project that I was working on. The project's graphics looks like Mario or Dangerous Dave, etc., you get the idea - old-school pixels. So anyway I remember trying to think of something else than AABB for character form, but I couldn't think of anything. Perhaps I could get a suggestion for this? Another thing is the world - I don't want it to be just linear world, I want mountains, etc.. My idea is to use triangles, and no idea yet what to do if I want just part of the cube, say 3/4 or 2/4 or whatever. Hard-coding such things seems inefficient. P.S. I am not looking at the precision level offered by Box2D. Actually I remember trying to implement it at first, but I failed as my understanding of C++ wasn't advanced enough, as it'll be mentioned below. P.P.S. I am programming in C++, and I haven't done it for a couple months now. I have no means of testing it either, as my PC is broken down, and this one can barely run games from late '90s, not to speak about a compiler or a program with inefficient resource management... I am also not an expert (obviously), I don't even know if I can consider myself an average programmer. In short, I am simply curious about my thoughts and my past experience when programming the game. I may come back to it when my PC is fixed, I'm already filling a note about these things.

  Read the article

• How can I calculate a vertex normal for a hard edge?

  - by K.G.

  Here is a picture of a lovely polygon: Circled is a vertex, and numbered are its adjacent faces. I have calculated the normals of those faces as such (not yet normalized, 0-indexed): Vertex 1 normal 0: 0.000000 0.000000 -0.250000 Vertex 1 normal 1: 0.000000 0.000000 -0.250000 Vertex 1 normal 2: -0.250000 0.000000 0.000000 Vertex 1 normal 3: -0.250000 0.000000 0.000000 Vertex 1 normal 4: 0.250000 0.000000 0.000000 What I'm wondering is, how can I determine, taken as given that I want this vertex to represent a hard edge, whether its normal should be the normal of 1/2 or 3/4? My plan after I glanced at the sketch I used to put this together was "Ha! I'll just use whichever two faces have the same normal!" and now I see that there are two sets of two faces for which this is true. Is there a rule I can apply based on the face winding, angle of the adjacent edges, moon phase, coin flip, to consistently choose a normal direction for this box? For the record, all of the other polygons I plan to use will have their normals dictated in Maya, but after encountering this problem, it made me really curious.

  Read the article

• Sort algorithms that work on large amount of data

  - by Giorgio

  I am looking for sorting algorithms that can work on a large amount of data, i.e. that can work even when the whole data set cannot be held in main memory at once. The only candidate that I have found up to now is merge sort: you can implement the algorithm in such a way that it scans your data set at each merge without holding all the data in main memory at once. The variation of merge sort I have in mind is described in this article in section Use with tape drives. I think this is a good solution (with complexity O(n x log(n)) but I am curious to know if there are other (possibly faster) sorting algorithms that can work on large data sets that do not fit in main memory. EDIT Here are some more details, as required by the answers: The data needs to be sorted periodically, e.g. once in a month. I do not need to insert a few records and have the data sorted incrementally. My example text file is about 1 GB UTF-8 text, but I wanted to solve the problem in general, even if the file were, say, 20 GB. It is not in a database and, due to other constraints, it cannot be. The data is dumped by others as a text file, I have my own code to read this text file. The format of the data is a text file: new line characters are record separators. One possible improvement I had in mind was to split the file into files that are small enough to be sorted in memory, and finally merge all these files using the algorithm I have described above.

  Read the article

• Why, in WPF, do we set an object to Stretch via its Alignment properties instead of Width/Height?

  - by Jonathan Hobbs

  In WPF's XAML, we can tell an element to fill its container like this: <Button HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> Why is it that when we set an element to Stretch, we do it via the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment properties? Why did the WPF design team decide to take this approach over having Width="Stretch" and Height="Stretch"? I presume it was a calculated decision, and I'm curious about the reasoning. CSS, among other technologies, follows the convention that stretching is done via the width and height properties, and that alignment affects positioning exclusively. This seems intuitive enough: stretching the element is manipulating its width and height, after all! Using the corresponding alignment property to stretch an element seems counter-intuitive and unusual in comparison. This makes me think they didn't just pick this option for no reason: they made a calculated decision and had reasons behind it. Width and Height use the double data type, which would ordinarily mean assigning it a string would be silly. However, WPF's Window objects can take Width="Auto", which gets treated as double.NaN. Couldn't Width="Stretch" be stored as double.PositiveInfinity or some other value?

  Read the article

• How to find keycodes for Fn + keys in Ubuntu 11.10

  - by budwiser

  I'm trying to find out the keycode for Fn+? keypress (left arrow). Xev outputs FocusOut event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001,    mode NotifyGrab, detail NotifyAncestor FocusIn event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001,    mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyAncestor KeymapNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,    keys:  4294967213 0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0              0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   If it is telling me the keycode here, I'm not able to interpret it so help would be appreciated. I'm also curious for finding out if it's possible to bind something to Fn+Del but when trying out this combination, Xev outputs KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001, root 0xad, subw 0x0, time 1984903, (-666,480), root:(53,533), state 0x0, keycode 119 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) " " XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) " " XFilterEvent returns: False KeyRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x3c00001, root 0xad, subw 0x0, time 1985008, (-666,480), root:(53,533), state 0x0, keycode 119 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) " " XFilterEvent returns: False which is exactly the same as pressing del without Fn. So, summary for short How can I find keycode for Fn+? (left arrow)? Is it even possible to bind something to Fn+Del or am I facing windmills here?

  Read the article

• Self-referencing anonymous closures: is JavaScript incomplete?

  - by Tom Auger

  Does the fact that anonymous self-referencing function closures are so prevelant in JavaScript suggest that JavaScript is an incomplete specification? We see so much of this: (function () { /* do cool stuff */ })(); and I suppose everything is a matter of taste, but does this not look like a kludge, when all you want is a private namespace? Couldn't JavaScript implement packages and proper classes? Compare to ActionScript 3, also based on EMACScript, where you get package com.tomauger { import bar; class Foo { public function Foo(){ // etc... } public function show(){ // show stuff } public function hide(){ // hide stuff } // etc... } } Contrast to the convolutions we perform in JavaScript (this, from the jQuery plugin authoring documentation): (function( $ ){ var methods = { init : function( options ) { // THIS }, show : function( ) { // IS }, hide : function( ) { // GOOD }, update : function( content ) { // !!! } }; $.fn.tooltip = function( method ) { // Method calling logic if ( methods[method] ) { return methods[ method ].apply( this, Array.prototype.slice.call( arguments, 1 )); } else if ( typeof method === 'object' || ! method ) { return methods.init.apply( this, arguments ); } else { $.error( 'Method ' + method + ' does not exist on jQuery.tooltip' ); } }; })( jQuery ); I appreciate that this question could easily degenerate into a rant about preferences and programming styles, but I'm actually very curious to hear how you seasoned programmers feel about this and whether it feels natural, like learning different idiosyncrasies of a new language, or kludgy, like a workaround to some basic programming language components that are just not implemented?

  Read the article

• How to hire support people?

  - by Martin

  I manage a tech support team at a mid-sized software company. We are the last line of support, so issues that we can't fix need to be escalated to the development team. When I joined the company, our team wasn't capable of much beyond using a specific set of troubleshooting steps to solve known issues and escalating anything else to the developers. It's always been a goal of mine for our team to shoulder as much of the support burden as possible without ever bothering a developer. Over the past few years, I, along with several new hires I've made, have made pretty good progress in that direction. We've coded our own troubleshooting tools which now ship with several of our products. When users have never-before-seen issues, we analyze stack traces and troubleshoot down to the code level, and if we need to submit a bug, half the time we've already identified in the code where in the code the bug is and offered a patch to fix it. Here's the problem I've always had: finding support people capable of the work I've described above is really difficult. I've hired 3 people in the past 3 years, and I've probably looked at several thousand resumes and conducted several hundred phone screens to do so. I know it's pretty well accepted that hiring good people is tough in the tech industry, but it seems that support is especially difficult -- there are clearly thousands of people walking around calling themselves support analysts, but 99%+ of them seemingly aren't capable of anything beyond reading a script. I'm curious if anyone has experience recruiting the sort of folks I'm talking about, and if you have any suggestions to share. We've tried all sorts of things -- different job titles/descriptions, using headhunters, etc. And while we've managed to hire a few good folks, it's basically taken us a year to find an appropriate candidate for each opening we've had, and I can't help but wonder if there's something we could be doing differently.

  Read the article

• How does a one-man developer do its games' sounds?

  - by Gustavo Maciel

  Before anything, that's not a "oh, where can I find resources?" question. Well, I've been curious about one thing in the indie games industry. For the development of the game, such tasks like game design, art, sketches, code programming and etc can be easily done by just one person. You can just take up a paper and pencil and you're a game designer. You can just take software like Photoshop or Paint and you're an artist, a scanner and you're a sketcher, a compiler and you're a programmer. For sound it's different. You may tell me: Well, follow the line, take a lot of instruments and record it. But all we know that things don't work this way. I can list up some changes for us: External noises are a big problem, sound effects can't be made with instruments, it can't sound like a recorded and clipped sound. Well I can imagine how they do this in large companies, with such big studios and etc. But to summarise, my question is: What's the best way for a one-man indie to do all its sound? Does he have to synthesize everything? Record and buy some crazy program for editing sounds?

  Read the article

• chrome memory and cpu footprint

  - by nmizar

  I've searched the forums for an answer but I couldn't find quite the answer I was looking for [1] , so I thought I it could as well be of interest to more people around here. I carry out a big part of my job on the browser (or for the browser, if you want to put it that way). I tend to use Chrome, because it's got natively many of the newest features that I need (DevTools stuff, mainly but not only). BTW, I'm usually running the last available Chrome version/build on a desktop Vaio with 4GB RAM and dual core CPU and Ubuntu 12.04 as distro and Gnome as window manager. So, I was curious about a) why does Chrome spawn so many threads even opening only three of four tabs and b) is there any way to allocate more memory to Chrome to prevent its performance from degrading? Thanks in advance, Nacho PS [1] I found threads about Chrome freezing or running out of memory but not about the reasons for this being so or for avoiding it to happen. PPS Of course, I could always buy a newer and more capable machine and that is exactly what I'm trying to evaluate: is this a question of outdated hardware or the problem will keep appearing on any (decently but not hugely sized) machine?

  Read the article

• Need Guidance Making HTML5 Canvas Game Engine

  - by Scriptonaut

  So I have some free time this winter break and want to build a simple 2d HTML5 canvas game engine. Mostly a physics engine that will dictate the way objects move and interact(collisions, etc). I made a basic game here: http://caidenhome.com/HTML%205/pong.html and would like to make more, and thought that this would be a good reason to make a simple framework for this stuff. Here are some questions: Does the scripting language have to be Javascript? What about Ruby? I will probably write it with jQuery because of the selecting powers, but I'm curious either way. Are there any great guides you guys know of? I want a fast guide that will help me bust out this engine sometime in the next 2 weeks, hopefully sooner. What are some good conventions I should be aware of? What's the best way to get sound? At the moment I'm using something like this: var audioElement = document.createElement('audio'); audioElement.setAttribute('src', 'paddle_col.wav'); audioElement.load(); I'm interested in making this engine lightweight and extremely efficient, I will do whatever it takes to get great speeds and processing power. I know this question is fairly vague, but I just need a push in the right direction. Thanks :)

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63  | Next Page >