Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

War heats up for top Silicon Valley talent

Posted in Education, Entertainment, News, Science, Tech, economy, gaming, what on November 11th, 2010 by admin – Comments Off

Reporting from San Francisco —

Google Inc.’s decision to give all of its 23,300 employees a 10% pay raise next year — and a $1,000 bonus to boot — is just the latest volley in what has become a full-fledged war for top Silicon Valley talent.

With engineers in short supply, technology companies are competing for employees who can write the software programs needed for new products and services. And they’re increasingly stealing them from one another.

Google is particularly vulnerable. The Internet search giant, long known for aggressively recruiting the smartest in the business, is under siege from Facebook Inc. and other competitors that are trying to lure them away.

A few weeks ago, Lars Rasmussen, the brainy co-founder of Google Maps and a six-year Google veteran, bolted for Facebook, joining more than 200 former Google employees who now work at the world’s most popular social networking service.

Facebook tapped its most persuasive pitchman to close the deal. Founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg personally wooed Rasmussen to move halfway around the world from his Google office in Sydney, Australia, to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

Facebook could be “a once-in-a-decade type of company,” the Danish-born computer science engineer said in explaining his decision.

That kind of talk rankles Google executives, who think they run the hottest company in Silicon Valley.

With 2,000 employees, Facebook is a much smaller operation than Google. Even so, 1 in 5 employees can list “Google” somewhere on their resumes, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Executive Chef Josef Desimone, who prepares fresh meals for Facebook employees.

Facebook says its recruiters don’t target Google; they seek out top candidates wherever they work.

“For us, it’s just important to find the best talent,” said Thomas Arnold, Facebook’s director of recruiting, who himself hails from Google. “If it comes from Google, that’s great. If it comes from Hewlett Packard, that’s great. If it comes from a start-up you have never heard of, that’s great. If it’s a kid sitting in a basement in small town somewhere who has created something neat on the Web, that’s even better.”

The flight to Facebook is not a subject Google would discuss, though it did throw out a few counterpunches: Google’s attrition, it said, remains below the industry standard. It hires more people every 10 days than Facebook has recruited in all from Google. And when Google makes a counteroffer to its employees, 70% decide to stay at Google rather than leave for Facebook, the company said.

“Google is an attraction and training ground for incredible talent,” recruiter Paul Daversa said. “The question is: Can Google fill up on talent as fast as it’s losing it?”

The skirmish for talent is driving up compensation and prompting a flood of offers and counteroffers. In one case, Google countered an offer from Facebook to a software developer with a promise of a 15% bump to his $150,000 salary, a quadrupling of stock benefits and a $500,000 cash bonus to stay a year, according to people familiar with the situation. He still took off for Facebook.

Google is hardly alone as it tries to make itself as sticky as flypaper to prospective recruits and employees alike.

Despite California’s unemployment rate of 12.4%, tech job listings are up 62% year over year in Silicon Valley, which has shown 11 straight months of growth, according to technology and engineering career website Dice.com. On any given day, companies are trying to fill 4,600 jobs on Dice.com, up from 2,800 open positions last year.

That reflects the strength of Silicon Valley’s major tech companies, chiefly Google, Apple Inc. and Facebook. Google dominates Internet advertising, Apple rolls out one must-have gadget after another, and Facebook has taken flight with more than 500 million users.

Along with these companies, there are newcomers such as Zynga Gaming Network Inc., a San Francisco company that makes wildly popular social games on Facebook and elsewhere. Zynga added 800 of its 1,200 employees in the last year alone.

With strong demand for their products and services, Silicon Valley companies have plenty of money to shower on signing bonuses and retention incentives.

“We believe this trend will only accelerate in the next 18 months,” Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, said on a call to discuss the company’s strong third-quarter results. “We strongly believe that the difference between the winners and the losers in our industry will be to a large extent determined by who can continue to attract and retain the very best people.”

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose firm helps the companies it invests in recruit engineers and other key employees, says the supercharged recruiting market is the “single hardest challenge in Silicon Valley.”

“A good engineer can easily have 10 job offers,” Andreessen said.

All the top companies are poaching from the same pool: sought-after workers with a prized mix of engineering chops, ingenuity and initiative.

They raid one another’s ranks, mine colleges and universities for promising prospects and jump at unusual opportunities to nab engineers. As soon as news broke this week that Ask.com was laying off 130 people, job offers started popping up on Twitter.

In September, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a computer science major at Stanford University, bet his roommate that in one hour he could create software that would search YouTube in real time. He lost the bet (it took him three hours) but YouTube Instant racked up 1 million users in 10 days, netting Aboukhadijeh a job offer from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Aboukhadijeh, already an intern at Facebook, decided to take the job at YouTube while he continues his studies at Stanford.

As the behemoths duke it out, some fleet-footed start-ups are giving everyone a run for their money in the recruiting department.

Facebook is competing with companies started by its own employees such as Asana, Path and Quora. These spinoffs are snapping up their share of the brightest engineers by appealing to their entrepreneurial instincts.

“There is definitely stepped-up and accelerated pace and urgency around courting the name talent and the high-quality talent,” Daversa said. “He who courts best is going to win. You have to embrace a candidate with a big bear hug. If you blink, he’s gone.”

jessica.guynn@latimes.com
War heats up for top Silicon Valley talent

California welfare cards can be used in many casino ATMs

Posted in News, gaming on June 24th, 2010 by admin – Comments Off
Reporting from Sacramento —

California welfare recipients are able to use state-issued debit cards to withdraw cash on gaming floors in more than half of the casinos in the state, a Los Angeles Times review of records found.

The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms, the review found.

State officials said Wednesday they were working to determine how much money had been withdrawn from casino ATMs by people using the welfare debit cards.

Call Of Duty : World At War

Posted in Entertainment on January 11th, 2010 by admin – Comments Off

Call Of Duty: World At War is the fifth title in the Call Of Duty franchise and is set to debut in November. The game is being developed by Treyarch but utilizes an updated version of the same proprietary engine used by Infinity Ward for coming up with the hugely successful Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Comparisons

The question on everyone’s mind seems to be, “Will it be better than COD4?” No one can really tell until the game hits the streets but, based on early reviews, it’s potentially on the same level. What seems certain though is that it’s going to be better than the much-maligned and excessively-rushed COD3, also developed by Treyarch.

While COD4 brought the series well into modern times, World At War will bring it back to its World War II roots. Since it will use the same engine as the former title, it should be safe to expect immersive graphics and rich environments. Hopefully, the gameplay will prove just as intense. The updated COD4 engine has been fitted with a new physics system, which should render flying bodies and similar effects more life-like and authentic.

Gameplay

World At War, like the rest of the games in the series, will be a first-person military-based shooter. Like its predecessors, it will have a single player and a multiplayer mode.

World At War’s single player campaign adopts the same narrative format successfully implemented in COD4. Like in the award-winning title, the player gets to jump between different characters and roles with a squad of AI-controlled soldiers supporting him.

New effects have been implemented to mimic real-life situations even closer. During fires, for instance, smoke will affect the gameplay drastically, leaving your team unable to see clearly and short of breath. In order to survive past the smoke, you will need to crouch and crawl your way to safety.

The same carefully-designed weapons in COD2 should appear in the game, hopefully with some brand new additions. A number of lethal fire-based weapons will be available (including flame throwers), along with flammable environments, making way for additional combat possibilities with plenty of explosions. According to recent interviews with the developers, the flame thrower is particularly important during the course of the game. Bullets can now be used to cut holes into thin walls, allowing enough of a gap to climb through and potentially surprise your enemies.

Possibly one of the most interesting additions to the whole game will be the advent of the Japanese Imperial Army. They are, essentially, a new enemy in the game and come fitted with a fresh slew of combat tactics and strategy. While they initially fitted the Japanese soldiers with regular Call Of Duty AI, it made for an awkward enemy, forcing Treyarch to perform in-depth research and development to bring genuine Japanese guerrila-style warfare tactics into the game. Soldiers who lived by the Bushido code, after all, should behave differently than their Western counterparts. Banzai charge and kamikaze attacks, anyone?

Since it’s not yet out, no hacks are currently available for World At War. It’s assumed, though, that much of the same functions will be fitted to its cheats as what were made available in COD4. The Aimbots (both vector and hitbox) were especially useful. Same with the various hacks to display enemy positions (Full 3D Map, Minimap Hack), those that allowed you to snipe opponents from afar or behind walls (Increased View Distance, Autowall) and those that gave you access to weapons beyond your class level. So yes, one can be sure that Call of Duty 5 hacks are due very soon.

Multiplayer

As of this writing, six multiplayer modes (including Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag) have been announced with the likelihood of many more, considering that COD4 had 13 variants.

The biggest news so far is an exciting new mode, multiplayer coop, which allows up to four players to simultaneously play World At War for one objective. It can be played on a single console via split screen or online. The coop is definitely a fascinating addition, extending the series’ playability over the long haul.

An additional cooperative mode featuring Nazi zombies can be unlocked once the single player campaign is finished. In the special game, up to four players will be set in conflict against undead Nazi soldiers. Players can earn points by facilitating kills and successful hits which can then be used to purchase additional weapons and accessories.

With the possibility of multiple players on cooperative modes, objectives will be more open-ended with numerous ways to complete missions. Multiple, simultaneous tasks are also present on different levels which can end up branching the flow of action to more than the typical linear path. While that is the official word, most fans simply assume it will be a minor change, leaving the game to its linear and sequential roots.

The perks system is retained for the online multiplayer mode, allowing individual characters to be fitted with unique abilities and skillsets.

Story

World At War features two campaigns in story mode. The first one depicts the United States Marine Corps’ battle with the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pacific while the second one follows the Soviet Red Army’s advance on Berlin. As such, it will be set in the Pacific theater and Eastern fronts of the second World War.

Big Shoes To Fill

With COD4’s critical and commercial success, World At War finds itself with big shoes to fill. The developers are stepping up – going so far as to hire popular actors like Kiefer Sutherland (24 fame) and Gary Oldman to voice the characters. Hopefully, it won’t disappoint the same way Treyarch’s ill-fated COD3 did. By all indications during initial reviews and first-looks, though, World At War doesn’t look like it will.