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An Unbelievable Demo

brendangregg.com

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#191

Post by dantondwa »

Agentlien wrote: post #126
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say most people hear divergence from their local accent, and consider theirs to be (at least subconsciously) a normal accent. This results in English people hearing my accent as a bit Irish, and Irish people hearing the English parts. Neither acknowledge fully the shared parts. In truth, I am a bit of both. So I'd say a strong American accent to an Australian is the most divergent one, not one that somebody in US…

I'm born and raised in Göteborg (Gothenburg), Sweden. My parents are originally from Karlskoga, 270km NE from here. Göteborg has a very distinct accent and I always get told by others that I have a very bland Swedish with no hint of that accent. But one time I was at a wedding in Karlskoga and talked to someone I hadn't met before. I opened my mouth and managed to get half a sentence out before he interrupted with "O…

Same experience for me. I am from the Venice area in Italy, which is famous for a very strong and somehow funny accent and dialect. However, my family is from central Italy. This resulted in me being considered having a Southern, definitely not local accent in Venice and me being considered Venetian by everyone else in Italy. Probably the truth is in the middle.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#192

Post by maccard »

mewse wrote: post #173
maccard wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Also, as a dev, you have no idea what version your users are updating _from_. You either need to generate some number of patches for every version you could be updating from, and figure out if you should just download the whole thing again in any of those cases anyway.

We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower. Instead, we just pack the uncompressed files together (frequently using normal zip in a no-compression mode) so that we can avoid needing to ask the OS to open and close files for us or examining the contents of a directory, both of which can be kind of startlingly slow (by video game standards) on some common OSes. I…

> We usually don’t compress the data on disk; decompression would make loading and file access slower.

_You_ mightn't but the last three AAA games I worked on do/did. PS5 expectes compressed files, and does HW decompression (ahem, mostly) on the fly.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#194

Post by watt »

irrational wrote: post #55

> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?

When the speaker is creaking like a frog, speaking in that weird vocal fry register. It's very american way of speaking.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#195

Post by WA »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #181
WA wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a German, the people in this video speak a heavy American accent: https://youtu.be/c9kI_rAFuKA?t=72

Well, that's a specific regional American accent, in the US called a Southern accent. Probably the only strong/widespread regional accent really left in the states (you could also argue for AAVE/ebonics but it's not regional in the same way). It's a bit like saying that someone from rural Bavaria who speaks with a strong Bavarian accent has a heavy German accent while speaking German.

Yes, but I'd bet that the Bavarian accent in particular is considered by foreigners as "heavy German". Bavarian culture (Oktoberfest) is considered "typical German".

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#196

Post by knolan »

My stories are very minor. I did my PhD in a reasonably well regarded mechanical engineering lab. My area is experimental fluid mechanics. I ended up writing a lot of Matlab code while there and even worked with a spin out company from the lab in the biotech sector for a while.

I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count cells in a microfluidic device using image processing. I sat down with them for a couple of hours and walked them through a few methods they could look into to get started collecting all the examples in a script. Basic stuff so they wouldn't feel overwhelmed. A few months later I see he published my simple introduction as a paper with zero modifications. He had the good grace to at least thank me in the acknowledgments.

Several years later while working a $BIG_TECH lab we interviewed a candidate from my old lab. They presented their work and had performed some data analysis of thermal camera images. Turns out they were using a script I'd written there and it was still actively used to work with the thermal camera. Nobody ever modified or improved the code — many engineering students are terrified of code. I was annoyed because there was no interest in further development the code, I don't think they even read it or understood it.

While at the spinout company I developed a software tool for the PCR optofluidics platform that was being developed. It was considerably faster and more robust than the hacked together script they were using before and had a user friendly UI that I build with feedback from the biologists on the team. A few years later the founder and one of their new students published a paper documenting their amazing tool without any reference or acknowledgment whatsoever. That one pissed me off.

There is a lot of ignorance around code authorship and respect for the developer in physical sciences research. Like I said, many are terrified by code but don't value the time and expertise it requires; once they have it they no longer think about its maintenance or acknowledging the author.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#197

Post by jasonkester »

It makes me sad that the way a developer is expected to react when they discover that the Valuable Thing that they gave away for free is being sold by a Big Company for Big Money is to try to ensure that the Valuable Things they give away in the future remain free.

I'd much prefer to see the people who build Valuable Things show more interest in capturing some of that value.

There's this overwhelming narrative revolving around Open Source that makes it seem shameful to profit from your work. It's maddening to watch. There's no reason we as developers need to be the low man on the totem pole getting tread on by business people. We just set ourselves up that way and socially punish anybody who doesn't.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#198

Post by alkonaut »

Aachen wrote: post #162
Twirrim wrote: post #89

Years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a role on my team. As usual, one of the ways I break the ice with candidates is to get them to talk "war stories". The team he'd worked on had produced a tool that was only ever intended to be used by the team to solve a particular problem they had. It contained proprietary code. Unknown to the team, word had spread about the tool, and others had started to use it, including s…

> having to rapidly re-architect the tool around a non-GPLv3 licensed library ... or just go with it and have it be open source? The old version is already open and free for anyone to request the code of. No rush at that point, you can withhold updates for a little while while you rearchitect this or take the situation as it is and have the next few bugfix releases also fall under GPL until you get around to replacin…

> Quickly removing the code doesn't change the previously released versions' license.

But would $BIG_CORP publish source on request for a proprietary product just because they built one version with a GPL library by mistake and later fixed it? Has this been successful, ever?

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#200

Post by ramraj07 »

brendangregg wrote: post #33
BrissyCoder wrote: post #10

Were there any legal repercussions? Was the employee fired? Were you as calm about this at the time as you seem now?... I would be furious! EDIT: For some reason I assumed OP was the author. Someone with a twitter account should ping him and get him over here to participate in discussion.

I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post): "You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be…

Wouldn’t you have made significant bank if you had sued? To the extent that you never had to work for a paycheck ever? Just curious if a lawyer consult might have been useful.
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