For all we know the back end of this thing is Steam. Gaben has been talking about changing Steam so anyone can make a storefront, and Humble makes a lot of sense as a test lab: they're already competent at sales and running a website, plenty of traffic (vs. jacobquickscaveofturn-basedstrateg.ie), and because they have ongoing business with Valve anyway they probably share a lot of data.
By not deploying code directly to the running servers he's adding bureaucratic overhead to the development process rather than getting rid of it. He's putting his people in as active gatekeepers in a way that hasn't been necessary for most web development in a long time.
"This way of working might still be prone to errors, but at least we are not running configuration updates or deploys against resources in production."
If the old method was too fast and lots of mistakes got through then the new process they chose was right for that team. However, treating config changes and deploys to production as if they're toxic in general is kind of disrespectful to the vast number of companies that deploy to prod without knocking over their own website for hours at a time.
On top of that, if the new process is "still error prone" then he just increased the effort required by his team and slowed the overall development of the product for nothing.
At this point there isn't one language for game devs. Even companies that strictly develop for PC tend to do their engine in C++ and then extend the ide with a scripting language like lua or python. Civilization 4 is a great example of it because they put the python api out as the user-moddable part of the game and it spawned this huge community. Other platforms like android (with its giant installed base) are basically java. So C++ isn't really the only answer to begin with.
Based on what I've been messing around with lately I'd look at go for maybe being a good complement or replacement for C++. Most of the time I'm making something with two major loops: game logic and rendering. Because of the way go interacts with C++ it's not hard to do the game logic in go, where I get massive benefit from "free" concurrency and pretty nice execution speed and then render in C++ where you can get back down to pointer arithmetic if you have to. This is outside of supporting any kind of scripting api/ide which I typically don't deal with but just for familiarity's sake and expecting others to use it later I would probably do in python.
In the 80s we acted faster on freon/CFCs than we have on climate change in the ensuing 30 years, with less danger to human life and less evidence. The only thing that's new about climate change as a scientific theory is the annual increase in the pile of evidence that it's happening and we're the cause of it.
Absolutely horrible example because .com owns .gov and the primary patent for CFC production expired in 1979, obviously lots of money is going to be poured into encouraging the use of patented CFC replacements, such as making the use of CFCs illegal. I'm not questioning the science of it, I'm explaining why .com and .gov worked together really hard on banning CFCs in the early/mid 80s, because HCFCs and HFCs are more profitable. The historical about-face is documented and hilarious how .com strongly denied CFCs could have any effect therefore .gov wouldn't ban them until the patent expired, then suddenly everyone agrees we need to use the more expensive HFCs and HCFCs.
I'm quite sure around the time HFC and HCFC patents expire we'll all have to suffer thru very well industry funded explanations of how R-141b causes excessive pr0n browsing or some such nonsense, so for the children, we'll all have to switch a new, ever more expensive refrigerant.
I'm sure if the patent for CFC production expired in 2020 we'd still be pumping the classic stuff out, along with an industry funded denial movement and probably an alignment on political party lines to prevent any progress, etc.
Bringing it back on the original topic the best way to get .com (and since the merger, .gov) to fund antibiotic research in the modern real world would be to genetically engineer bacteria genome to contain an encoded .avi of the SuperBowl or an encoded Miley Cyrus .mp3 or something like that. Maybe glycophosphate resistant MRSA would get some attention from the usual suspects.
If someone could figure out how to patent global warming or global cooling we'd be on to something...
This is nonsense. Some large portion of industry would be happy enough to not pay royalties.
There are also at least several countries with little regard for patents and significant industrial bases that none the less signed on to treaties to limit and cease the production of CFCs...
But sure, Dupont made the US government strong arm India and China into paying for their new refrigerants. And Russia too.
Exactly. Those are two specific things that needed to be eliminated. Climate change deals with a lot of bad actors, and a very broad category of changes.
You should pay them $100/hr for the interview if you're having them work. There are some companies that have people come in for half a day or a day as part of their interview (not onboarding) and they cut them a check after.
"Some arguments for inclusion take this form: if content protection of some kind has to be used for videos, it is better for it to be discussed in the open at W3C, better for everyone to use an interoperable open standard as much as possible, and better for it to be framed in a browser which can be open source, and available on a general purpose computer rather than a special purpose box. Those are key arguments for the decision that this topic is in scope."
This is ridiculous. The W3C should continue to refuse supporting DRM of any kind in order to keep the adoption of these technologies as difficult as possible. Yes a company like Netflix can just make a plugin for an existing browser to chat with an app they install on your desktop/tablet/whatever. Let them do that and convince their users that they should install their software and why - leave the rest of us out of it.
I actually think that EME in HTML -- by narrowing the scope of the DRM part -- encourages what further use of DRM there is to be done in way which minimizes the cost of transitioning too a fully-open format (since it facilitates a model where the only non-standard piece is the DRM handling, as opposed to DRM being the lever to get high-value content into proprietary platforms.)
It really doesn't matter how standard DRM is. Who cares really if we want to get rid of it? The harder it is (making DRM for publishers and distributors), the better it is for users, since it will give more incentives to stop using it sooner. Making DRM harder to spread should be the goal, not making it easier in any way.
