Still sounds fun.
Haha, yup, we do that too. When it’s archaeological we have to consult with the tribes council to get permission to exhume and study the remains. We have a fairly good relationship with the tribes here–they mostly want to know what we want to know, so they want us to release all of the results of our investigations and such to them. It really does depend on the tribe, though…there are tribes who don’t want anything to do with their dead once they’re buried. In fact, I hear the deceased’s name isn’t even allowed to be spoken after death.
The skeletons we have in storage are either forensic* and archaeological**, and the difference between both is fascinating. I’ve found that the teeth on the forensic specimens are more likely to have gone to complete shit (cavities and abcesses and such), whereas the archaeological specimens will just have worn down. I actually think there was someone who said that the reason for this might be attributed to easy modern access to sugary, starchy food. Drug use affects this as well, such as smoking or illegals like meth.
Forensic anthropologists also get a lot of “OMFG WE FOUND BONE THERE’S BEEN A MURDER CALL THE NEWSPAPERS” kind of calls, but upon further investigation (that is, the anthropologist picking up the bone and looking at it), they turn out to be animal bones.
*Specimen has been buried for less than 60 years
**Specimen has been buried about 60 years or more
There are at least a few other game developers on the dope, I know. One trouble with something like that, unfortunately, is that we have pretty strict policies about what you’re allowed to post on public message boards. The moment I say that I work for company X and then later post any random comment about game Y made by company Z, people get into a tizzy, yada yada yada. So it would probably have to be pretty darn generic. (I’ve probably revealed at some point where I work. It’s not an actual secret, per se. But the less I do so, the better.)
Your old fashioned computer mouse (the ones that used to have the ball in it) worked by spinning wheels that touched the ball. Those wheels had slots in them, and the mouse worked by shining infra-red beams through the slots. By using two beams per wheel with the slots slightly offset, and using two wheels, one in the X direction and one in the Y direction, the mouse could tell how far you moved by counting how many times each beam was broken. The microcontroller in the mouse would simply count how many times the beam was broken for each wheel and which direction the wheel was going, and it would periodically send these counts back to the computer. Modern optical mice figure out the movements in a different fashion, but still send the counts back in the same format.
The “unit” for those counts is called the Mickey. And yes, it is named after Mickey Mouse.
Computers also do things “in a jiffy”. One “jiffy” in a computer is typically one tick of the system timer, which varies depending on what operating system you are using. In most operating systems, the jiffy clock interrupt is used to run the OS kernel, so once every jiffy the OS decides things like whether or not it is going to do a task switch.
Most people are familiar with the computer term “byte” (as in gigabyte for the amount of RAM you have, etc). A byte in a computer is 8 bits. Half a byte (4 bits) is called a nybble.
Currently, a byte is 8 bits, but that’s not always been the case. See byte
Also; a “word” is traditionally some amount of bits between about 8 and 128, depending on the CPU, though 16, 32 and 64 are the most common in relatively modern PCs.
Megabyte and Gigabyte are terms that have multiple interpretations: powers of 2 for RAM; 1 Kb is 2 ^ 10 == 1024 bytes, one Gb is 1024 ^ 3 == 1,073,741,824 bytes, powers of 10 for drive space: 1 Gb == 1,000,000,000 bytes. Quite a lot of people in computers think that the only reason for this confusion is because drive manufacturers want to make it look like their drives have more storage than they actually do.
The “official” IEC term for the powers of two series is Kibibyte and Gigibyte etc, but nobody seems to use those since they sound stupid.
Dental Tip O’ the Day: Someone (I don’t remember who) made the point that grit can wear the teeth down faster than cavities can develop, so you got that going for you.
For some reason, they really annoy me in their inconsistency. I don’t recall any that are remotely accurate, they all pause, leap forward suddenly, or are inconsistent on rate…a “dumb” animated .gif to fake it would work just as well.
I’m looking at you, TIVO, and your damn “Acquiring satellite info…95%”. The developers apparantly saved all of their hardest work for that last 5%.
Heh, I have the inverse problem : whenever somebody in a TV series or movie uses a computer, and it shows a loading bar moving at a steady rate, I get twitches 
What’s a loading bar?
I work for a company that copies medical records, where HIPAA (not hippa… it drives me crazy when people in the medical field spell that wrong) is a very big deal. What a lot of people don’t realize is there are many people in many situations that can legally look at and have copies of your medical records (which include date of birth, social security number, previous names, addresses, phone numbers, etc… an identity theft nightmare) without your permission or knowledge. Even if you ask your doctor to give you a list of how many times your information has been released and to who, there are some things that don’t have to be on there.
Oh and I get to read your personal information. Sometimes I giggle at your name.
AKA progress bar. Shows the percentage completion of a lengthy task so that the user knows the system has not crashed, and can estimate if they have time to fetch a cup of coffee…and yes, this is hard to do well, as it can be very difficult to determine how long a task is going to take when you don’t know what sort of system the customer will be running the program on.
It’s even harder in games, I imagine, where mere accuracy isn’t really sufficient - ideally, you want the loading screens to take the player out of the game world as little as possible. Mass Effect, for example, did this with elevators - a player “taking an elevator” to the next floor would usually be loading the next bit of the level. A lot of players found this annoying, so Mass Effect 2 did away with that conceit - now, loading screens are just loading screens.
Personally, I kind of miss the elevators - yes, they were annoying, but they were the sort of annoyance you’d expect to run into in the Mass Effect world. One could imagine Shepard et al bitching about the goddamned elevators on their spaceship, the Normandy, and wondering why the hell the damned Protheans couldn’t do better. One can’t imagine that about loading screens - they take you, inevitably, out of the game world.
Thanks for explaining it.
Still sounds fun.
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Robes are way cool. When I’m gowning for court, it’s like I’m putting on my armour. I’m no longer plain Mr. Piper.
I’m Super-Piper, ready to do battle with motions, citations and my awesome knowledge of case-law!
Plus, watching your opponent spill water with his robes is always good for a giggle.
And, if you’re litigating in French, you get to refer to them as “mon toge”, which makes me think I just stepped out of the Forum…
I personally find it hilarious that in Mass Effect 2, the loading screen consists of a wire frame model of the ship, and it’s tracking the position of the elevator!!
The development staff must have had a really good laugh. I know that I laughed the first time I encountered it.
nitpick : ma, not mon. Toge is feminine.
People where I work have long, serious arguments over the use of mallocs. In embedded, real-time software. These kids today think that memory just rains down from the heavens.
I index books. The most obscure fact about my profession is apparently that it exists at all. Most people seem to think that indexes are somehow automatically created by a piece of software.
Yes! Questions such as: “What’s a loading bar?” LOL! (I think it’s that little colored strip that tells me how close the program is to completing a task, is that right?)
Importing an aircraft mounted radar system to a US office without proper certifications does not violate the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). However, that extra-fast laptop you ordered in order to process the information it collects very well might.
I work in mental health. People always say ‘that must be so rewarding’. Well, about 10% of the time it is, the rest of the time it’s an absolute test. So, like any other job? 