Interestingly... I have one. But it's not in computer science. In fact, for a variety of reasons, it turns out that I have never taken a single computer science course in my life. Instead, I ended up with a degree in psychology.
This is not all bad. Here's the thing: In the real world, nothing is all that specialized. So, ability to handle a diverse set of kinds of problems is more useful than specialized training -- especially since, roughly 18-19 years after I graduated, any training I could have had back then would probably be only marginally relevant now. Learning to do research, learning to handle more kinds of input... Those have paid off a lot.
So I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to think that people who have a particular background (say, a couple more years of school) might typically perform better. I don't know whether it's actually degrees that lead to the difference, or whether it's the difference in skills and experience. Certainly, of the classes I took in college, the ones that have been most useful to me from a career standpoint have mostly been in the social sciences. I learned a lot about interacting with people from a class on persuasion. I learned how to do effective research primarily from a class on Arthurian legends, of all things. In short, the classes that have been having the most effect on how I can get things done have not been the classes you might think would be relevant to what I do for a living now. (Except that the writing classes have paid off a fair bit for, well, writing.)
So, basically... For a lot of careers, I think a vocational school degree is certainly plenty to do the job, as is just happening to know how to do it, but in many cases, I think a broader education will have a big payoff in real ability to get things done, whether or not HR departments care. (And given that I'm mostly employable, it turns out that after you have 10-15 years of experience, no one really cares what your degree was in.)
Sounds more like ADHD than a "bad work ethic" to me. I had problems like that. Put me on stimulants, I'm magically better (until I have heart problems and have to stop taking them). Take me off 'em, I'm flaky again.
My brain is flaky enough that I once had a firecracker go off in my hand because, in the two seconds of sparking and hissing between when I lit it and noticed the fuse lighting, and when it went off, I got distracted and forgot I was holding it. That's not a matter of a work ethic.
Sales are not the measure of a game's financial success.
Profits are.
Game development costs on the Wii are between 1/4 and 1/2 those of development costs on the HD consoles. Prices, by contrast, are about 20% lower. What that means is that you don't need to sell NEARLY as many copies of a game to make money -- and that means more successful games that target "niche" audiences.
People talk about how "badly" No More Heroes sold -- but it sold several times more copies than Killer 7 did on the Gamecube and PS2 put together, even though it came out in a much smaller market (the number of Wii systems out when NMH was released was a fraction of the number of PS2 systems out when K7 was released). By most accounts, it was profitable enough that they plan to do a sequel.
This is exactly the stuff we saw people saying about the DS, and here we are, with DS games being hugely profitable for people who put real time and effort into them. There have certainly been profitable third-party Wii games; RE4 was one, Mario & Sonic Olympics (Sega) was one... And there have probably been others. The big problem is still the casual fallacy; the notion that people who want an approachable game don't care about quality. I care a ton about quality, just not very much about graphics resolution. People who make fun games are selling them to me quite effectively. People who make more flavor-of-the-month shooters aren't. (That said, I did get The Conduit, because it looked really polished.)
I read a trilogy of robot novels, authorized by the Asimov estate presumably, by Roger MacBride Allen. I got the first one figuring any port in a storm, I was bored, etcetera. I got the other two because I really enjoyed the first one, and I thought they were a thoughtful and well-considered exploration of part of that universe.
I've read a few of Mickey Zucker Reichert's books. The Nightfall book (and its sequel) were a little heavy on the Mary Sue for my tastes, but nonetheless had some interesting and/or well-done parts. She did a pair of "Renshai" trilogies set in a Norse setting which I really enjoyed reading, and which had some very interesting characters and plots.
She's no Asimov, but:
* The last time I read a new story set in Asimov's setting, it was rewarding and I enjoyed it. * I have liked Reichert's work in the past.
In short, I'll probably buy them, and I'll probably enjoy them. I'm a lot happier with that than I would be with not having the option. I'd prefer if they opened things up further, but since I can't have this, I'll settle.
And seriously, quit yer whining. Mickey Zucker Reichert is a decent author with a track record. In particular, the key to that Norse series is that she managed to write stories which were convincingly and unmistakably set in an existing setting, and yet, which told new stories and developed characters in interesting ways. This is not some horrible tragedy. If they'd picked Stephanie Meyer, yeah, there'd be torches and pitchforks. But MZR will do fine if there's not too much executive meddling.
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
No, a mini doesn't draw about 85 watts. A mini COULD in THEORY under FULL LOAD draw about 85 watts. You're very unlikely to keep it fully loaded, so it'll draw a lot less. It is more expensive, true, but: If it does stuff an order of magnitude faster than the super-cheap low-end system, that reduces your costs. Think about "time it takes to rebuild the kernel", and how much that costs, for instance. Basically, on modern CPUs, speed is often also power efficiency.
You can spend a ton of time and effort trying to beat this one, or you can get something aimed at solving your problem out of the box. (BTW, the other candidate I'd recommend, which is nigh-identical, is "a cheap laptop".)
I had a job through some small firm (I'd name them except I might have the name wrong). Did a ten month contract, got fired, went through various stuff with unemployment.
The contracting firm had only filed paperwork and reported my income for six weeks or so out of that ten month contract.
Great argument, except that Apple does nothing to prevent you from playing your MP3s on any device you want. They don't even do anything to keep any device you want from providing sync software which uses their exported API/interface/etc. to do the sync.
All they do is not support you with the iTunes program itself. You can use those files elsewhere, no problem.
Yes. They're violating a spec in a way that undermines the sanity/safety of USB device drivers.
Imagine that you managed to get a license from Apple to write sync software to talk to an iPod. (I know, it sounds unlikely, but... say you did.)
What happens when someone hooks up a Pre, and it turns out the Pre was relying on an undocumented happenstance or quirk of the iTunes implementation, and blows your program up? Who gets the hassle from the support calls? You do.
IMHO, they should not forge USB device IDs. If that means they have to write their own sync software using the documented and exposed XML interface, okay, well, they can do that.
This has nothing to do with reverse engineering, and not all that much to do with interoperability.
You do not need to look like an iPod to sync with the iTunes library -- you just have to write your own sync software, rather than using Apple's.
Apple has no obligation I can see to support syncing with devices other than their own. And, in fact, I think they have a compelling case that no one else should be trying to sneak into that protocol, or at the very least, that they're welcome to take steps to discourage or prevent this.
If Palm wants to sync with the iTunes library, well, the tools to do that are freely available, documented, and so on. What they want is to sync with the iTunes application, without apple's consent. And that means that, when it blows up, people call Apple tech support. And when it corrupts the database, people call Apple tech support. And Palm spends no money and gets a free ride, at someone else's expense.
That sounds sleazy. I think they should just do it the right way and drop this stupid stuff.
The original choice to use UMD instead of carts was stupid, because it killed battery life. (UMD for video is stupid because it's not DVD, so nothing else plays it, and you'd end up buying movies twice, once in each format -- which very few people will do, so it's dumb.)
However. Once you've *got* UMD, you should probably keep it. It sucks that if I were to get a PSP Go, my existing PSP games wouldn't play on it -- so I won't get one. Basically, the time to change formats and invalidate existing game collections is *between* generations, not *during* a generation.
It has a messenging service. What if I send a friend a picture through it? How about the text of a chunk of an article?
And you're wrong about the levels, mods, etc. -- since you can access them only through PSN, you get BOTH ToS, not just the one. It's covered by PSN ToS because it was transmitted over PSN, and it may well also be covered by the game's ToS.
But mostly... This is *Sony*. Let's say I never send anything at all through PSN. And someone at Sony steals one of my articles (I used to make a living writing freelance; there is stuff there which could be stolen). And when I complain, they just claim it was sent over PSN. After all, they have logs showing it.... Or will shortly.
Basically, after the rootkit thing, I don't trust Sony enough to even be a party to an agreement that gives them unlimited rights.
To me, anyway -- the complete and (in some versions of the document -- there's more than one!) exclusive worldwide rights to any "user created content" -- any data you ever upload through the service -- are too much. I do not trust Sony on the other hand of an agreement like that. Conclusion: No PSN for me. Thus, no games for the PSP Go. Idiots.
Nintendo's been keeping that price high while, probably, continuing to produce units at record-breaking paces. Why? Because they don't want to run out this year. Makes sense.
I still love the Wii. I have a ton of fun games for it, and honestly, the only real competition it faces is WoW and my DS. I think the rumors of a new higher-powered model are pretty implausible -- although the DSi makes me more willing to believe it's *possible*. But I just don't see the point. It's powerful enough to play fun and interesting games. There isn't an insanely huge third-party library, but so what? I'm never gonna clear even half the games I have already, I just don't have the time.
Thanks to spam, and the refusal of ISPs to take action about spam, email is not reliable enough for documents like this.
When Level3 stops hosting the five or six consistent 24/7 spammers I've been complaining to them about for the last year straight, and my spam load is otherwise improved enough that the filters can be scaled back and I can still get work done, I'll think about electronic statements. Right now, email is simply not reliable enough. (And no, I can't count on whitelisting, because I can't trust companies like T-Mobile to send their own mail from a consistent address and host -- and if they use an ESP, they may well use one which has a history of spam, and gets filtered.)
This is a cost-of-spam issue. When spam stops imposing huge risks of lost information, I think email will be a great choice for things like this, and I'll sign up for them. That hasn't happened yet.
I get a couple of emails a month, maybe a bit more, from people who want me to break into stuff, because they saw that I was associated with an article on "hiring a hacker" and they wanted to pay me to break into stuff.
I generally point out that they should maybe have read the article first.
I actually did make a couple of tries at getting a non-PS3 Cell. Mercury didn't even bother to respond in any way at all to my emails (although they did start spamming me two years later).
For $400 or so, you could get a slightly weakened Cell. Or for... Who knows? I couldn't even get the other vendors to return queries. Which of these is more appealing to a hobbyist?
We got one of those once. We host a mirror of the IF Archive (text adventures), including three games named Days of Doom 1, Days of Doom 2, and Days of Doom 3.
Here's the local copy:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 seebs users 116471 Oct 17 1999 Doom3.zip
They sent us a threatening letter because they believed this was the retail version of Doom 3.
The Economist had a fairly in-depth look at "sex offenders" rules in the US recently. It's much worse than you think.
Somewhere out there, there's a couple who are now happily married. Some years ago, as teens, they had sex. The girl's mom is on the sex offender registry for not preventing this. (Actual case; her name is Janet Allison, and she is "party to the crime of child molestation".)
I pretty much aim for about 40 hours. I'll do maybe closer to 50 during busy times. Anything past that, I expect them to make it up to me somehow -- and they usually do just fine about that. The management know that if we are working much longer hours, it means something is probably wrong, and they regard it as evidence that they need to fix the schedule. Sometimes, they really do ask for more work, but at least so far, comp time has been real and has actually worked out pretty well. I would not stay someplace that expected me to do 50+ hours regularly; that would indicate to me that they didn't understand basic facts about engineer capabilities. So I work a reasonable amount, put in a bit of extra time when it seems like it'll make a big difference, and sometimes slack a bit when things are slower and/or I'm a bit burned out. We make deadlines, the code's decent, and everybody's happy.
I've seen people whose managers wanted a lot more than that, and I've also seen people leave and go to other jobs, and I think that's pretty closely related. It is not healthy to try to work 60-hour weeks all the time, and since it's bad for developers, it ends up being bad for companies -- it produces worse code.
Slashdot Mirror
Because a broader education turns out to make more effective workers.
Interestingly... I have one. But it's not in computer science. In fact, for a variety of reasons, it turns out that I have never taken a single computer science course in my life. Instead, I ended up with a degree in psychology.
This is not all bad. Here's the thing: In the real world, nothing is all that specialized. So, ability to handle a diverse set of kinds of problems is more useful than specialized training -- especially since, roughly 18-19 years after I graduated, any training I could have had back then would probably be only marginally relevant now. Learning to do research, learning to handle more kinds of input... Those have paid off a lot.
So I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to think that people who have a particular background (say, a couple more years of school) might typically perform better. I don't know whether it's actually degrees that lead to the difference, or whether it's the difference in skills and experience. Certainly, of the classes I took in college, the ones that have been most useful to me from a career standpoint have mostly been in the social sciences. I learned a lot about interacting with people from a class on persuasion. I learned how to do effective research primarily from a class on Arthurian legends, of all things. In short, the classes that have been having the most effect on how I can get things done have not been the classes you might think would be relevant to what I do for a living now. (Except that the writing classes have paid off a fair bit for, well, writing.)
So, basically... For a lot of careers, I think a vocational school degree is certainly plenty to do the job, as is just happening to know how to do it, but in many cases, I think a broader education will have a big payoff in real ability to get things done, whether or not HR departments care. (And given that I'm mostly employable, it turns out that after you have 10-15 years of experience, no one really cares what your degree was in.)
Read the guy's facebook.
Then tell me with a straight face that it is reasonable to imagine that he set up some such fakery in order to have an alibi for a trivial robbery.
Sounds more like ADHD than a "bad work ethic" to me. I had problems like that. Put me on stimulants, I'm magically better (until I have heart problems and have to stop taking them). Take me off 'em, I'm flaky again.
My brain is flaky enough that I once had a firecracker go off in my hand because, in the two seconds of sparking and hissing between when I lit it and noticed the fuse lighting, and when it went off, I got distracted and forgot I was holding it. That's not a matter of a work ethic.
Sales are not the measure of a game's financial success.
Profits are.
Game development costs on the Wii are between 1/4 and 1/2 those of development costs on the HD consoles. Prices, by contrast, are about 20% lower. What that means is that you don't need to sell NEARLY as many copies of a game to make money -- and that means more successful games that target "niche" audiences.
People talk about how "badly" No More Heroes sold -- but it sold several times more copies than Killer 7 did on the Gamecube and PS2 put together, even though it came out in a much smaller market (the number of Wii systems out when NMH was released was a fraction of the number of PS2 systems out when K7 was released). By most accounts, it was profitable enough that they plan to do a sequel.
This is exactly the stuff we saw people saying about the DS, and here we are, with DS games being hugely profitable for people who put real time and effort into them. There have certainly been profitable third-party Wii games; RE4 was one, Mario & Sonic Olympics (Sega) was one... And there have probably been others. The big problem is still the casual fallacy; the notion that people who want an approachable game don't care about quality. I care a ton about quality, just not very much about graphics resolution. People who make fun games are selling them to me quite effectively. People who make more flavor-of-the-month shooters aren't. (That said, I did get The Conduit, because it looked really polished.)
I read a trilogy of robot novels, authorized by the Asimov estate presumably, by Roger MacBride Allen. I got the first one figuring any port in a storm, I was bored, etcetera. I got the other two because I really enjoyed the first one, and I thought they were a thoughtful and well-considered exploration of part of that universe.
I've read a few of Mickey Zucker Reichert's books. The Nightfall book (and its sequel) were a little heavy on the Mary Sue for my tastes, but nonetheless had some interesting and/or well-done parts. She did a pair of "Renshai" trilogies set in a Norse setting which I really enjoyed reading, and which had some very interesting characters and plots.
She's no Asimov, but:
* The last time I read a new story set in Asimov's setting, it was rewarding and I enjoyed it.
* I have liked Reichert's work in the past.
In short, I'll probably buy them, and I'll probably enjoy them. I'm a lot happier with that than I would be with not having the option. I'd prefer if they opened things up further, but since I can't have this, I'll settle.
And seriously, quit yer whining. Mickey Zucker Reichert is a decent author with a track record. In particular, the key to that Norse series is that she managed to write stories which were convincingly and unmistakably set in an existing setting, and yet, which told new stories and developed characters in interesting ways. This is not some horrible tragedy. If they'd picked Stephanie Meyer, yeah, there'd be torches and pitchforks. But MZR will do fine if there's not too much executive meddling.
They'd NEVER file multiple lawsuits against people for infringing totally obvious patents, right? Of course not! That'd be like saying that Slashdotters actually believed half the stuff they said about freedom and rights.
No, a mini doesn't draw about 85 watts. A mini COULD in THEORY under FULL LOAD draw about 85 watts. You're very unlikely to keep it fully loaded, so it'll draw a lot less. It is more expensive, true, but: If it does stuff an order of magnitude faster than the super-cheap low-end system, that reduces your costs. Think about "time it takes to rebuild the kernel", and how much that costs, for instance. Basically, on modern CPUs, speed is often also power efficiency.
You can spend a ton of time and effort trying to beat this one, or you can get something aimed at solving your problem out of the box. (BTW, the other candidate I'd recommend, which is nigh-identical, is "a cheap laptop".)
I had a job through some small firm (I'd name them except I might have the name wrong). Did a ten month contract, got fired, went through various stuff with unemployment.
The contracting firm had only filed paperwork and reported my income for six weeks or so out of that ten month contract.
I would not use that firm again.
Great argument, except that Apple does nothing to prevent you from playing your MP3s on any device you want. They don't even do anything to keep any device you want from providing sync software which uses their exported API/interface/etc. to do the sync.
All they do is not support you with the iTunes program itself. You can use those files elsewhere, no problem.
Yes. They're violating a spec in a way that undermines the sanity/safety of USB device drivers.
Imagine that you managed to get a license from Apple to write sync software to talk to an iPod. (I know, it sounds unlikely, but... say you did.)
What happens when someone hooks up a Pre, and it turns out the Pre was relying on an undocumented happenstance or quirk of the iTunes implementation, and blows your program up? Who gets the hassle from the support calls? You do.
IMHO, they should not forge USB device IDs. If that means they have to write their own sync software using the documented and exposed XML interface, okay, well, they can do that.
This has nothing to do with reverse engineering, and not all that much to do with interoperability.
You do not need to look like an iPod to sync with the iTunes library -- you just have to write your own sync software, rather than using Apple's.
Apple has no obligation I can see to support syncing with devices other than their own. And, in fact, I think they have a compelling case that no one else should be trying to sneak into that protocol, or at the very least, that they're welcome to take steps to discourage or prevent this.
If Palm wants to sync with the iTunes library, well, the tools to do that are freely available, documented, and so on. What they want is to sync with the iTunes application, without apple's consent. And that means that, when it blows up, people call Apple tech support. And when it corrupts the database, people call Apple tech support. And Palm spends no money and gets a free ride, at someone else's expense.
That sounds sleazy. I think they should just do it the right way and drop this stupid stuff.
The original choice to use UMD instead of carts was stupid, because it killed battery life. (UMD for video is stupid because it's not DVD, so nothing else plays it, and you'd end up buying movies twice, once in each format -- which very few people will do, so it's dumb.)
However. Once you've *got* UMD, you should probably keep it. It sucks that if I were to get a PSP Go, my existing PSP games wouldn't play on it -- so I won't get one. Basically, the time to change formats and invalidate existing game collections is *between* generations, not *during* a generation.
It has a messenging service. What if I send a friend a picture through it? How about the text of a chunk of an article?
And you're wrong about the levels, mods, etc. -- since you can access them only through PSN, you get BOTH ToS, not just the one. It's covered by PSN ToS because it was transmitted over PSN, and it may well also be covered by the game's ToS.
But mostly... This is *Sony*. Let's say I never send anything at all through PSN. And someone at Sony steals one of my articles (I used to make a living writing freelance; there is stuff there which could be stolen). And when I complain, they just claim it was sent over PSN. After all, they have logs showing it.... Or will shortly.
Basically, after the rootkit thing, I don't trust Sony enough to even be a party to an agreement that gives them unlimited rights.
To me, anyway -- the complete and (in some versions of the document -- there's more than one!) exclusive worldwide rights to any "user created content" -- any data you ever upload through the service -- are too much. I do not trust Sony on the other hand of an agreement like that. Conclusion: No PSN for me. Thus, no games for the PSP Go. Idiots.
Nintendo's been keeping that price high while, probably, continuing to produce units at record-breaking paces. Why? Because they don't want to run out this year. Makes sense.
I still love the Wii. I have a ton of fun games for it, and honestly, the only real competition it faces is WoW and my DS. I think the rumors of a new higher-powered model are pretty implausible -- although the DSi makes me more willing to believe it's *possible*. But I just don't see the point. It's powerful enough to play fun and interesting games. There isn't an insanely huge third-party library, but so what? I'm never gonna clear even half the games I have already, I just don't have the time.
One simple reason:
Thanks to spam, and the refusal of ISPs to take action about spam, email is not reliable enough for documents like this.
When Level3 stops hosting the five or six consistent 24/7 spammers I've been complaining to them about for the last year straight, and my spam load is otherwise improved enough that the filters can be scaled back and I can still get work done, I'll think about electronic statements. Right now, email is simply not reliable enough. (And no, I can't count on whitelisting, because I can't trust companies like T-Mobile to send their own mail from a consistent address and host -- and if they use an ESP, they may well use one which has a history of spam, and gets filtered.)
This is a cost-of-spam issue. When spam stops imposing huge risks of lost information, I think email will be a great choice for things like this, and I'll sign up for them. That hasn't happened yet.
Long story short:
Some things you pick up. Some things you really do learn a lot faster from explicit teaching.
I get a couple of emails a month, maybe a bit more, from people who want me to break into stuff, because they saw that I was associated with an article on "hiring a hacker" and they wanted to pay me to break into stuff.
I generally point out that they should maybe have read the article first.
Maybe someone who wants to mess with Cell?
I actually did make a couple of tries at getting a non-PS3 Cell. Mercury didn't even bother to respond in any way at all to my emails (although they did start spamming me two years later).
For $400 or so, you could get a slightly weakened Cell. Or for... Who knows? I couldn't even get the other vendors to return queries. Which of these is more appealing to a hobbyist?
Because a mini is about $600, and adequate for most peoples' uses. For $2k, you're starting to look towards the higher end of the laptop line.
We got one of those once. We host a mirror of the IF Archive (text adventures), including three games named Days of Doom 1, Days of Doom 2, and Days of Doom 3.
Here's the local copy:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 seebs users 116471 Oct 17 1999 Doom3.zip
They sent us a threatening letter because they believed this was the retail version of Doom 3.
I assume the rest are comparable.
The Economist had a fairly in-depth look at "sex offenders" rules in the US recently. It's much worse than you think.
Somewhere out there, there's a couple who are now happily married. Some years ago, as teens, they had sex. The girl's mom is on the sex offender registry for not preventing this. (Actual case; her name is Janet Allison, and she is "party to the crime of child molestation".)
It's not new, and it's not something that can be sustained for long on most servers -- it's too easy to make or farm more of most items.
I pretty much aim for about 40 hours. I'll do maybe closer to 50 during busy times. Anything past that, I expect them to make it up to me somehow -- and they usually do just fine about that. The management know that if we are working much longer hours, it means something is probably wrong, and they regard it as evidence that they need to fix the schedule. Sometimes, they really do ask for more work, but at least so far, comp time has been real and has actually worked out pretty well. I would not stay someplace that expected me to do 50+ hours regularly; that would indicate to me that they didn't understand basic facts about engineer capabilities. So I work a reasonable amount, put in a bit of extra time when it seems like it'll make a big difference, and sometimes slack a bit when things are slower and/or I'm a bit burned out. We make deadlines, the code's decent, and everybody's happy.
I've seen people whose managers wanted a lot more than that, and I've also seen people leave and go to other jobs, and I think that's pretty closely related. It is not healthy to try to work 60-hour weeks all the time, and since it's bad for developers, it ends up being bad for companies -- it produces worse code.