What a silly idea. Seriously. Who do they think writes most of the good Wikipedia articles now? Try "University professors" (and grad students, and particularly bright undergrads). Who pays them? Not "the (internet) community" but the REAL community in REAL dollars. Otherwise I, and other people like myself (yes, I suckle at the ivory teat myself), couldn't afford to write online textbooks or suggest to random strangers who think that they've managed to solve the problem of unifying the field by drawing pictures of strange crystalline projections or by claiming that everything is determined by Mach's principle and the electron that they should think about getting psychiatric help.
As many people have noted, the University system provides a number of invaluable functions for society as a whole. Perhaps its most important one is that it serves as a crap-filter. According to the APA, something like one person in seven meets the diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder. One in thirteen or thereabouts are sufficiently neurotic that they drive anyone who has to work with them mildly crazy. One in thirty or forty has a more serious condition -- bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, serious (as opposed to mild) OC. Ballpark of one person in ten is an alcohol abuser, one in twenty five an overt alcoholic. 50% of the population has an IQ under 100, and 100% of that 50% think that they are just as smart as anybody else in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Any or all of these conditions in combination -- overt stupidity, borderline personality, drug or alcohol abuse -- suffice to make people too dysfunctional to finish college and/or graduate school.
So the ones that do, especially the ones that get advanced degrees and are qualified to teach at the University level, really are filtered out a bit. They probably are in the top five percent in intelligence (whatever that means), they may be crazy but they are usually not TOO crazy to get along with their advisor, their committee, the other students in their group, and if they are substance abusers they are smart enough that they can compensate, at least for now, and still get things done. Good schools -- ones with actual standards and serious classes that students can screw up and fail -- extend the filter down through the undergrad ranks, so that graduates in almost any major are more likely than not to be functional enough to hold down a real job and make real contributions to any endeavor -- certainly a better bet than pulling names out of the phone book.
And a wiki-University is going to perform this filtration service exactly how? And who is going to pay to liberate the time of the people who are smart enough to actually learn the material well enough to teach others? Do they have to sell pop-up ads on their personal bullshit blogs where they expound upon whatever it is that they are supposedly teaching? Oh, wait, I know! They can put a little "contribute" button on their webspace and hope that they make enough in a month to actually buy their starving dog a bone...
And then there is the research support and the fact that our University system is largely responsible for our high standard of living in our highly technical culture and the fact that college is the best time most college students ever have and a place they learn lots of SOCIAL things and have great experiences while they are NOT yet in the workforce and...
Amen, brother. If Linux supported major games and closed codex's native -- no wine, cedega, vmware, virtualbox, etc in the way -- Windows would be dealt a real hammer blow, even today. After all, what do most people do with their computers? Browse the web, movies, music, youtube, games, and oh, yeah, work. And what is work? An office suite. Sometimes an actual application, but most often it is just email, a spreadsheet, a word processor, or if you are in sales or something presentation ware.
Linux has the web and office software well and truly covered -- Open Office and Firefox are arguably better than MS Office and Explorer, and MS Office is still insanely expensive to where a lot of people are using OO and FF even on Windows systems just to avoid having to pay. Linux does decently with at least some codex's these days and can thus play music and many kinds of video (and will probably do better when open HTML 5 starts to replace rather closed Flash, if it ever does. Where it loses hearts and minds is absolutely games. Accelerated video support still sucks in Linux after all of these years (where nearly all other hardware except rare and stupidly designed USB devices is decently supported), and one still can't play World of Warcraft native.
I do find it really amusing that an article like this is coming out right when Google is poised to take over the desktop and everything else in the interactive Universe by virtue of simply eliminating operating system dependence altogether, so that it no longer matters whether or not your system is Apple, Linux, BSD, Microsoft. When Google Chrome IS your GUI desktop, when all your primary working software is built in to Chrome or loaded over the network on demand (to be locally saved or not, depending), when there are numerous competitors all providing that same sort of layered independence (including a lot of browser-based games) -- come tell me again how the desktop wars are over.
Indeed. To my fairly extensive experience, remarkably few uberhacker-level coders became coders by means of getting a degree in CS of any sort. Almost none of them, actually. I am a physicist, but I teach periodic independent study students how to program in C because nowadays CS departments only teach (crap like) java or C++ -- great to prepare a student to be a corporate clone, not so good for learning how to work close to the metal. I sometimes teach 3rd year CS students who still don't know what a pointer is or how to use malloc or manipulate structs. But with only one, maybe two exceptions, my best students over years have not been CS majors (and the ones that were were smart as hell and did CS not to learn to "program" but to learn about algorithms, assembler, microcode, and systems programming, and maybe to increase their marketability a bit in the process).
Real coders, on the other hand, tend to be born, not made. They learn on their own, usually in apprenticeship with either a specific guru/mentor or (nowadays) with the support of internet-based social networking with distributed guru-level mentoring. In most of the cases I know of personally the potentially "brilliant" programmers taught themselves how to program after taking a single course, maybe two, where they learned just how cool it is to build machines out of words. Sometimes they did this in a terrible language with terrible habits, but by staying up and working on their own projects until 3 am at the expense of sleep and personal hygiene for several years they become immersed in the coder "culture". When I teach one of these guys, it is mostly to beat good habits into them, teach them how to toplevel organize large bodies of code (not perfectly, but better than they have been doing:-), how to use make and unix toolsets if they've been doing all of their hacking in a gui-driven ide that hides all of the guts of the OS and low level interface from them, convince them that not to comment their code is to die either at my hands or at their own when they try to figure out their own code a year from now, how to use svn. Oh and sure, how to code in C, but they ALREADY know how to code, usually in two or three languages (sometimes including C++) -- it's more like "topics in C", making them (finally) learn about pointers and so on.
Some of them are indeed interested in gaming, but all of them are interested in being entrepreneurs. They like hacking on their own shit. All they want is (eventually) a clear pathway towards making a living at it (or getting rich) without having to work for a soul-sucker. It isn't the 80 hours a week that daunts them -- they would LOVE to spend this kind of time on something really cool. Its doing what they are told, working on boring stuff, doing something they think is stupid, not being able to be creative in their work.
So yeah, its a rough pathway to success, but the ones that succeed (and some of them do, at least according to legend:-) still do make four or five million by the time they are 25, usually by getting together with three or four like minded friends and as you say, build a game just because they can and then have enough marketing savvy to actually publish it and make money (until they get bought out or come up with a best-seller and make the big time). That's how at least some companies originally got onto the scene, isn't it?
The open source software process that has been so good at producing toplevel systems such as linux (driven almost entirely by these independent types) has alas not been kind to the would-be game programmer because it is so very hard to SELL games there, and games are way too difficult to produce and maintain without any derived income in the long run. That could still change. One day blizzard might realize that they could GIVE away a linux-native version of WoW (and dump the emulator or VM layers that currently add hassle and cost speed when using it on a primary linux platform, which I did for years until I finally kicked the e-co
You mean that one of the Roman Catholic Church's greatest thinkers had faith that reason and faith were equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all, where everyone else who actually uses reason knows perfectly well that this is not, in fact, true? This is a perfect example of the problem -- this WAS one of its greatest thinkers...
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What a silly idea. Seriously. Who do they think writes most of the good Wikipedia articles now? Try "University professors" (and grad students, and particularly bright undergrads). Who pays them? Not "the (internet) community" but the REAL community in REAL dollars. Otherwise I, and other people like myself (yes, I suckle at the ivory teat myself), couldn't afford to write online textbooks or suggest to random strangers who think that they've managed to solve the problem of unifying the field by drawing pictures of strange crystalline projections or by claiming that everything is determined by Mach's principle and the electron that they should think about getting psychiatric help.
As many people have noted, the University system provides a number of invaluable functions for society as a whole. Perhaps its most important one is that it serves as a crap-filter. According to the APA, something like one person in seven meets the diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder. One in thirteen or thereabouts are sufficiently neurotic that they drive anyone who has to work with them mildly crazy. One in thirty or forty has a more serious condition -- bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, serious (as opposed to mild) OC. Ballpark of one person in ten is an alcohol abuser, one in twenty five an overt alcoholic. 50% of the population has an IQ under 100, and 100% of that 50% think that they are just as smart as anybody else in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Any or all of these conditions in combination -- overt stupidity, borderline personality, drug or alcohol abuse -- suffice to make people too dysfunctional to finish college and/or graduate school.
So the ones that do, especially the ones that get advanced degrees and are qualified to teach at the University level, really are filtered out a bit. They probably are in the top five percent in intelligence (whatever that means), they may be crazy but they are usually not TOO crazy to get along with their advisor, their committee, the other students in their group, and if they are substance abusers they are smart enough that they can compensate, at least for now, and still get things done. Good schools -- ones with actual standards and serious classes that students can screw up and fail -- extend the filter down through the undergrad ranks, so that graduates in almost any major are more likely than not to be functional enough to hold down a real job and make real contributions to any endeavor -- certainly a better bet than pulling names out of the phone book.
And a wiki-University is going to perform this filtration service exactly how? And who is going to pay to liberate the time of the people who are smart enough to actually learn the material well enough to teach others? Do they have to sell pop-up ads on their personal bullshit blogs where they expound upon whatever it is that they are supposedly teaching? Oh, wait, I know! They can put a little "contribute" button on their webspace and hope that they make enough in a month to actually buy their starving dog a bone...
And then there is the research support and the fact that our University system is largely responsible for our high standard of living in our highly technical culture and the fact that college is the best time most college students ever have and a place they learn lots of SOCIAL things and have great experiences while they are NOT yet in the workforce and...
rgb
Amen, brother. If Linux supported major games and closed codex's native -- no wine, cedega, vmware, virtualbox, etc in the way -- Windows would be dealt a real hammer blow, even today. After all, what do most people do with their computers? Browse the web, movies, music, youtube, games, and oh, yeah, work. And what is work? An office suite. Sometimes an actual application, but most often it is just email, a spreadsheet, a word processor, or if you are in sales or something presentation ware. Linux has the web and office software well and truly covered -- Open Office and Firefox are arguably better than MS Office and Explorer, and MS Office is still insanely expensive to where a lot of people are using OO and FF even on Windows systems just to avoid having to pay. Linux does decently with at least some codex's these days and can thus play music and many kinds of video (and will probably do better when open HTML 5 starts to replace rather closed Flash, if it ever does. Where it loses hearts and minds is absolutely games. Accelerated video support still sucks in Linux after all of these years (where nearly all other hardware except rare and stupidly designed USB devices is decently supported), and one still can't play World of Warcraft native. I do find it really amusing that an article like this is coming out right when Google is poised to take over the desktop and everything else in the interactive Universe by virtue of simply eliminating operating system dependence altogether, so that it no longer matters whether or not your system is Apple, Linux, BSD, Microsoft. When Google Chrome IS your GUI desktop, when all your primary working software is built in to Chrome or loaded over the network on demand (to be locally saved or not, depending), when there are numerous competitors all providing that same sort of layered independence (including a lot of browser-based games) -- come tell me again how the desktop wars are over.
Indeed. To my fairly extensive experience, remarkably few uberhacker-level coders became coders by means of getting a degree in CS of any sort. Almost none of them, actually. I am a physicist, but I teach periodic independent study students how to program in C because nowadays CS departments only teach (crap like) java or C++ -- great to prepare a student to be a corporate clone, not so good for learning how to work close to the metal. I sometimes teach 3rd year CS students who still don't know what a pointer is or how to use malloc or manipulate structs. But with only one, maybe two exceptions, my best students over years have not been CS majors (and the ones that were were smart as hell and did CS not to learn to "program" but to learn about algorithms, assembler, microcode, and systems programming, and maybe to increase their marketability a bit in the process).
Real coders, on the other hand, tend to be born, not made. They learn on their own, usually in apprenticeship with either a specific guru/mentor or (nowadays) with the support of internet-based social networking with distributed guru-level mentoring. In most of the cases I know of personally the potentially "brilliant" programmers taught themselves how to program after taking a single course, maybe two, where they learned just how cool it is to build machines out of words. Sometimes they did this in a terrible language with terrible habits, but by staying up and working on their own projects until 3 am at the expense of sleep and personal hygiene for several years they become immersed in the coder "culture". When I teach one of these guys, it is mostly to beat good habits into them, teach them how to toplevel organize large bodies of code (not perfectly, but better than they have been doing:-), how to use make and unix toolsets if they've been doing all of their hacking in a gui-driven ide that hides all of the guts of the OS and low level interface from them, convince them that not to comment their code is to die either at my hands or at their own when they try to figure out their own code a year from now, how to use svn. Oh and sure, how to code in C, but they ALREADY know how to code, usually in two or three languages (sometimes including C++) -- it's more like "topics in C", making them (finally) learn about pointers and so on.
Some of them are indeed interested in gaming, but all of them are interested in being entrepreneurs. They like hacking on their own shit. All they want is (eventually) a clear pathway towards making a living at it (or getting rich) without having to work for a soul-sucker. It isn't the 80 hours a week that daunts them -- they would LOVE to spend this kind of time on something really cool. Its doing what they are told, working on boring stuff, doing something they think is stupid, not being able to be creative in their work.
So yeah, its a rough pathway to success, but the ones that succeed (and some of them do, at least according to legend:-) still do make four or five million by the time they are 25, usually by getting together with three or four like minded friends and as you say, build a game just because they can and then have enough marketing savvy to actually publish it and make money (until they get bought out or come up with a best-seller and make the big time). That's how at least some companies originally got onto the scene, isn't it?
The open source software process that has been so good at producing toplevel systems such as linux (driven almost entirely by these independent types) has alas not been kind to the would-be game programmer because it is so very hard to SELL games there, and games are way too difficult to produce and maintain without any derived income in the long run. That could still change. One day blizzard might realize that they could GIVE away a linux-native version of WoW (and dump the emulator or VM layers that currently add hassle and cost speed when using it on a primary linux platform, which I did for years until I finally kicked the e-co
Evolution in action (to answer the last question). Nothing to do but wait.
You mean that one of the Roman Catholic Church's greatest thinkers had faith that reason and faith were equally valid ways to truth and not in conflict at all, where everyone else who actually uses reason knows perfectly well that this is not, in fact, true? This is a perfect example of the problem -- this WAS one of its greatest thinkers...