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In the US, Census data is used for redistricting purposes, which CAN influence election outcomes in the future - so the implications of a census may be wider than you think. I don't know exactly the way it works in Australia, but some googling has led me to believe they use a system that is similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_(Australia)

Many companies in the games industry have settled on using Perforce or SVN (or more recently Plastic DVCS) internally as, out of the box, it can handle both code and non-code assets (i.e. large binary files) well in tandem. Git has problems with the latter - people have tried to correct this with solutions like git-annex and git-LFS but these have failed to catch on thus far.

Kind of - it depends on the artist you talk to. OpenSubdiv utilities have been part of the major 3D packages for about a year or two now, and it's true that they can offer some significant speedup, well-needed in both the games and per-rendered CGI industries where high-poly subd models can easily go up to several million triangles.

Besides the speedup, there is a very interesting feature of OpenSubdiv - local edge creasing. To influence the general creasing or smoothing of a subd mesh, an artist usually has to add more or subtract geometry in an area, respectively - whereas OpenSubdiv gives you the alternative option to assign a crease value to an area of the source mesh which influences the apparent creasing of the resultant mesh in that area without the artist having to add more geo. It works some of the time: not every artist likes using local edge creases but for those that do, it can be a very big help, considering the the occasional difficulty in adding new geometry to a mesh that flows correctly and doesn't accidentally ruin the rest of the mesh.

This really doesn't tell me anything about Unity, especially in respect to other solutions.

- Unity is only for games

Who said they were? You can find lots of examples of game engines being used for other applications, such as in Archviz, non-game simulation areas, interactive art, etc.

- You can only do small games with Unity

Again, who said this? If an engine is free and well supported you might find a lot of smaller games on it, but that's not indicative of the engine as a whole. If you're planning on making a large game, the question you'd be asking is not whether you can make a larger game in Unity, but whether it's appropriate for your larger game in particular.

- Unity is worse than Unreal Engine

Now that's a opinion if I've ever heard of one. Also, you don't need to use C++ to use Unreal. UE4 natively supports Blueprint scripting out of the box (I wouldn't recommend making a game completely in a visual programming language to begin with, anyway). Support for interacting with Unreal through other languages (JavaScript, Nim, etc.) has shown significant progress in the community.

- You don’t need programming knowledge to use Unity

Many of the popular free engines nowadays have some form of visual programming feature. You'd be severely hurting yourself trying to accomplish a bigger problem using visual languages only, however.

- All Unity games looks the same

Some gamers enormously conflate a game's art with its engine, which is completely wrong. Bad art will look bad in any environment - any developer would know that.

- Unity has a lot of bugs

That's an incredibly vague statement that you can apply to just about any large software project, not even just game engines.

Some (maybe) lesser known gems for Windows machines:

http://www.peazip.org/ - Zipping/Unzipping utility, better than WinRAR or 7-Zip

http://implbits.com/products/hashtab/ - Shell extension that adds a panel in the file properties window that can compute and compare a hash against many different hash functions

http://mactype.net/ - Shell extension that gives various options to modify Windows' anti-aliasing scheme. Useful if you're not a fan of TrueType's look. Can cause noticeable lag and drawing issues on some less powerful systems, though

http://cmder.net/ - Alternative, more-featured terminal emulator for windows (works with both Cmd/PowerShell)

Cool stuff, but unfortunately Intel has really delayed AVX512 instructions for their main consumer processors (ffs, it was supposed to hit on Skylake). It looks like we have another die shrink to go after Kaby Lake before we get that sweet ultra-wide SIMD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonlake

Usually you can just search for languages with weird unsearchable names as "*lang".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language) (Not really sure how you'd search for this language in particular, though...)

I'm surprised people don't really think about this in the opposite direction - that programming can be used to help understand math better. How many people have gotten along better with linear algebra and calculus by virtue of messing around in a game engine? Having to actually apply math knowledge to solving problems - some applicable context - works wonders for cementing and fertilizing that knowledge.

Many a student thinks to themselves in a math class: "Man, I'll never use this." When you actually need the math, suddenly you have this "oh shit" moment and you step into gear.

I'd argue that their Surface line seems to be going on quite well - in fact, its been inspiring a lot of copycats itself (e.g. Elite X2, Asus Transformer Book, IdeaPad Miix)

Apparently out of sheer coincidence, it landed me on a Voyager episode that I had just watched yesterday

Attention to all websites with "live support chats" that randomly pop in the corner without prompt: please stop doing this.

I've been using a language that uses python-style indentation (Nim) and while I've grown to like to like the language itself, the back of my mind pines for braces. At least using braces, I can immediately auto-indent a region of code and not have to worry about anything. I sucked it up, though, and I got used to the pythonic syntax anyway.

Either way, opening an article that says "Your programming language is probably unproductive" which immediately devotes itself to whining over pedantic syntax bullshit...makes me not want to read it.

True, but I'd at least regard such a system as likely fairly fault tolerant, considering its been in use for 50+ years.

The article mentions that the oldest actual computer in use by the government regards nuclear strike operations, and that it's actually being upgraded sometimes next year. I find this...concerning? Says they're upgrading terminals and data storage, which seems pretty harmless, but I feel like in terms of nuke-launching tech, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a pretty good philosophy to live by.

Interesting, most people would say "the milk went sour" or "the milk soured," and not that it went "stale." "Stale" as a word just sounds weird in the context of a drink.

Steam reviews aren't exactly a great way to measure whether or not you should buy a game...more often then not, it's mostly just 12-year-olds trying (and failing) to make jokes