is less about rewarding creators and more about corporate control of OUR culture
Agreed. Hence, my sig. But I still think there is a place for "intellectual property." We just need to stick to the original intent of the law--a time limited incentive to create.
creators: i'm sorry your grandchildren can't live off your one hit wonder. i'm sorry you won't be a billionaire for "inventing" shamwow.
There is the funny thing. The inventor of the Sham Wow might get a patent, which is in effect for a relatively brief period of time. But the guy who designed the logo? A copyright is practically forever. (Yeah, I know it's all owned by a company, not people, but you get the point.)
I'm just waiting for patent reform to swing the other way, with big business pushing for patents that last more like copyrights. It makes sense, in a sick way. If a person accepts that a song ought to be locked up for a century, why should the cure for cancer be any different? It didn't require less creative effort. Thank goodness we are not headed there, the patent situation is arguably improving a little.
I stopped going to burning man years ago when it became a commercialized corporate mess.
I was planning on going to my first burn many years ago... talked with my group about who would be responsible for what and all that. I bought tickets. I planned recipes. I was happily shopping for generators and stuff.
Then, I read the rules about taking a camera to the event and what they'd let you do with the pictures afterward.
I sold my tickets, apologized to my group for backing out, and haven't wanted to go since.
I understand the arguments for protecting people's privacy... and the image of the very profitable event too, I guess. It's a private event and they can do what they like.
But the rules were much too strict for my taste. If I am going to be taking pictures, I prefer that the negotiations about what is a reasonable photo are between myself and whoever might be in the photo, without the involvement of Black Rock LLC and their camera registry.
My girlfriend has a "Cat Genie," which is basically an automated cat toilet. It's filled with plastic granules, and a robot arm scoops out the poop and drops it into a hopper where it is blended with tap water and flushed down the drain. The bowl full of plastic bits then gets a wash/rinse cycle to get rid of the pee. (It actually works pretty well though you need to hack the wash solution cartridges to refill them. Otherwise it's expensive like an inkjet printer.)
My dog, a chihuahua, climbed into the Cat Genie and dropped a deuce one day while we were out of the house. I had never encouraged him to do that--it was entirely his idea.
Because he is trained not to poop in the house, he must have analyzed the situation and made a decision that it was OK to poop where the other animals were pooping. And it had to be an effort for him, too. He had to climb inside the foreign, scary, noise-making thing, something he normally wouldn't do even if a beloved toy was in there.
It's not a doggie Einstein moment, you rocket surgeon dog owners may not be impressed... but it's the smartest thing I have ever personally seen a dog do.
It's interesting times, when I, a long-time Apple fan, choose to use my old Zune* to play MP3s instead of my iPhone.**
If you do things the Apple way, the iPhone works well as an MP3 player. But try to deviate from The Way, and it lashes out with retard strength to punish you. (I clicked no, don't sync, I'M SORRY I CONNECTED YOU TO MY WORK COMPUTER, PLEASE DON'T SYNC, and you delete content from my iPhone anyway?)
The Zune, on the other hand, is eager to please with features like guest mode so you can use it on multiple computers... but sometimes, it craps itself when it's giving you a hug and you have to delete and rebuild the library data.
When the Zune dies, which won't be long as it has started to randomly reboot, I need to find a MP3 player with a large hard disk and a lobotomy, that just works as a USB mass storage device.
* I swear to God, it was a gift.
** Which I only bought because refurbs were available at that time and I could hack it to work with my current ATT plan. At full price? No thanks.
Once again, we are really seeing the difference between Russian and American engineering culture.
When it came time to develop a toilet for the ISS, NASA ended up running with an absurdly complicated $91 million dollar model designed by Lockheed-Martin (certain subsystems were provided by Raytheon).
The toilet has over 1500 moving parts, consumes 800W of power when in use, and took one hundred engineers six years to manufacture. Despite this impressive pedigree, the toilet remains a fussy piece of equipment. To this day peanuts and certain other troublesome foods are actually prohibited on the ISS.
The Russians, of course, just used a pencil.
(Well, none of that is true, but I never let that stop a good story and neither should you.)
I am a game designer. And whenever anyone tells me they want to be a game designer, I tell them what a cop once told me back when I was in high school and wanted to be a cop. "Be a fireman instead." You like games? Maybe stick with playing them, instead of seeing how the sausage is made.
Game designer is a job that has the potential to become extremely crummy. It also has the potential to be extremely rewarding. You'll hit both extremes. In a good job, the highs outweigh the lows. Good design jobs are hard to come by. Most games aren't finished and shipped.
How do you become a designer? The question is hard to answer neatly, because there are many different "design" positions in the industry. My company has design specialties that don't exist at other companies. A highly marketable designer is flexible.
Many, even most designers have NO developer experience. You don't need to know C++ to create a good first-person shooter level with the Unreal editor. If you are designing a game system, like how some kind of a card game works, or the way your shields regenerate, you don't necessarily need to know programming for that either.
But for any designer, having familiarity with programming is VERY useful though. When you work with an engineer to bring a system to life you have an understanding of what is realistic to ask for.
Though you don't need to be a programmer, most design jobs do require some kind of scripting, or at least content creation using hacky, ugly, unfriendly tools. You don't need to be an engineer, but you do usually need to be technical.
That all said, if you are a whiz designer who is also a developer, that is an excellent skill set to have. Even so, you might not do much programming in a design position. It depends on where you are and how they do things.
A company local to me does mostly FPS games. I know someone there, and he says that basically all the designers are level designers. That means grinding away in a 3d editor plus scripting language, making playable spaces. They do not seem to have designer/developer hybrids. Seems like you are one or the other there, mostly. Other places might not have such a division.
Then, take a company that does MMOs. They have designers who just do the game's story. You sit around and dream up factions and NPCs and make flow charts of missions, and collaborate with level designers to make the whole package work. Maybe you write the NPCs' lines, too, and collaborate with concept artists. No programming there.
In some companies, the engineers don't have much to do with the design. The design staff says, "it works like this" and the engineers make it happen--if it's reasonable. If the engineer is design-minded, it can be a fun collaboration. Or, management can keep devs and designers apart with barbed wire. I have seen it work both ways.
Then, sometimes there is that guy who is a designer and is fully capable of implementing his designs in executable code... if the company structure allows for it.
So in the end, programming games does not necessarily mean designing games, and designing games definitely doesn't mean you have to be a programmer. It depends very much on the team you are in.
Back to the original question... what should you do?
Make games. Use the editors and mod tools that are out there, and create some playable stuff. Or start doing paper games and making friends play them. If you are not doing something online, try to get a paper game in print, even if it's a small run and self-funded. Like an artist, you need a portfolio. If you can create material that is fun while you develop your technical skills, you are on the right path.
What technical skills are useful? At my office I see C++, ActionScript/Flash, and SQL stored procedures. Scripting languages I see a lot of include Lua and Unreal's Kismet, but there are many options.
Your "build" can emphasize either design or programming, but honestly being a whiz at both is the best. Helps if you can write, too, but it's rarely sought after.
Then, you just need to find a way to get to the top of the resume pile... but that's a different story.
Even if a pharma company was handed the cure for a rare disease on a silver platter, they might not choose to sell it because there is still a cost to put it on the market. You have to set up a production line, print packaging, etc etc.
If the government was handing out cures for diseases right and left, I think you'd have to mandate that the companies receiving the "gifts" would have to offer the no-profit or at-loss cures in order to sell the ones that they COULD make money on. But I'd be ok with forcing compliance that way.
...but because we as a species have a difficult time trusting in a 'higher power' to save us.
It seems more like we have a problem trusting a moderately higher power. Put God or the President in the cockpit and at least half the passengers would be perfectly content. But no one completely trusts invisible Captain Bob.
... The husband was a tool and die maker in the auto industry, and both the husband and wife considered it their patriotic duty to invest in America.
Wow. A patriotic investment portfolio is even dumber than patriotic car buying.
If I have a patriotic duty to my nation's companies, that duty is to keep them strong and healthy. But blindly supporting your national industries does NOT keep them strong. Ask more of them. Make them compete. Make them innovate. Make them EARN your business. If they can't do that, they do not deserve your support.
If you buy in anyway out of loyalty, you are helping to build a house of cards and in the long run that helps no one. Except for some company executives, anyway.
The franchise has touched upon issues like capital punishment, homosexuality, evaluation of moral perspective, discrimination and bias, tradition vs. progression.
I liked the new movie and consider it good Star Trek.
OK, it didn't have the social commentary of the half black/half white face guys, but it did have a genocide. I'll admit they didn't talk about it much, because they were busy shooting. But they did at least touch on how it changed some of the characters. Message: Genocide is bad.
Wrath of Khan, which I also consider good Trek, also did not spend a lot of time on its moral message. "Don't play God" was the lesson there for anyone who cared to look past the basic revenge story and sweet space battles.
The recent Trek movies didn't provide good action OR good stories... so we're still ahead of the game with the reboot!
We've seen some keen devices, like the Kindle, hampered by their crappy software.
Likewise, the Sony Reader... I have one, and for the $50 it cost me as part of a credit card signup gimmick, I love it. But before I can spend a few hundred bucks on another similar item, it has GOT to be easier to use. Sony's desktop software is poor, and converting other formats for the device is a pain in the rear.
Please, Samsung... Let this thing mount like a USB storage device. Teach it to understand txt, rtf, html, pdb, pdf, and maybe even chm--WITHOUT needing to do any conversion on my computer. And add in whatever DRM-infested format you want on top of it, fine... but please, make a product that's for readers and not PUBLISHERS.
(I have ancient Pocket PC ebook reading software that transparently handles displaying text in all of these formats, even inside zip files. It ain't rocket surgery.
Right now the closest thing to an uber-reader, for my needs, is this thing. Spiffy, but if someone beats them on price, I'd be there.
Done right, and for short haul travel, rail is way better than air travel. What you lose in sheer speed of the plane, is more than made up for, by the time saved by not getting to the airport, checkin, luggage screening, and that sort of thing.
If trains do make some kind of comeback, I think we will have the same kind of "security" features there as we do for air travel.
Procedural mistakes should not overturn convictions that are this overwhelming.
You may as well say that procedural requirements should not interfere with the business of national security.
Procedures and the laws that enforce them are what make our pretty decent free society possible. Sometimes a procedural error results in a dismissal, and justice is not done. It sucks, but IMHO that is an unavoidable side effect of building a system that protects the innocent.
The alternative is a system where procedures are ignored when it is convenient, which has got to be worse.
Not that I disagree... but to play Devil's advocate I would point out that North Korea has this very strong cultural desire for self-dependence. Even if they could buy a launch cheaper, they might just want to do it themselves.
Merit pay for teachers would probably derive from some new standardized test for the students. Which, as you said, is a bad idea.
The standardized tests in schools always become a big deal consuming resources and attention to the exclusion of some other important lessons. So, in the process of trying to do something good, they'll screw up the system even more, and reward teachers who are best at gaming the system.
Slashdot Mirror
is less about rewarding creators and more about corporate control of OUR culture
Agreed. Hence, my sig. But I still think there is a place for "intellectual property." We just need to stick to the original intent of the law--a time limited incentive to create.
creators: i'm sorry your grandchildren can't live off your one hit wonder. i'm sorry you won't be a billionaire for "inventing" shamwow.
There is the funny thing. The inventor of the Sham Wow might get a patent, which is in effect for a relatively brief period of time. But the guy who designed the logo? A copyright is practically forever. (Yeah, I know it's all owned by a company, not people, but you get the point.)
I'm just waiting for patent reform to swing the other way, with big business pushing for patents that last more like copyrights. It makes sense, in a sick way. If a person accepts that a song ought to be locked up for a century, why should the cure for cancer be any different? It didn't require less creative effort. Thank goodness we are not headed there, the patent situation is arguably improving a little.
I stopped going to burning man years ago when it became a commercialized corporate mess.
I was planning on going to my first burn many years ago... talked with my group about who would be responsible for what and all that. I bought tickets. I planned recipes. I was happily shopping for generators and stuff.
Then, I read the rules about taking a camera to the event and what they'd let you do with the pictures afterward.
I sold my tickets, apologized to my group for backing out, and haven't wanted to go since.
I understand the arguments for protecting people's privacy... and the image of the very profitable event too, I guess. It's a private event and they can do what they like.
But the rules were much too strict for my taste. If I am going to be taking pictures, I prefer that the negotiations about what is a reasonable photo are between myself and whoever might be in the photo, without the involvement of Black Rock LLC and their camera registry.
Related Anecdote:
My girlfriend has a "Cat Genie," which is basically an automated cat toilet. It's filled with plastic granules, and a robot arm scoops out the poop and drops it into a hopper where it is blended with tap water and flushed down the drain. The bowl full of plastic bits then gets a wash/rinse cycle to get rid of the pee. (It actually works pretty well though you need to hack the wash solution cartridges to refill them. Otherwise it's expensive like an inkjet printer.)
My dog, a chihuahua, climbed into the Cat Genie and dropped a deuce one day while we were out of the house. I had never encouraged him to do that--it was entirely his idea.
Because he is trained not to poop in the house, he must have analyzed the situation and made a decision that it was OK to poop where the other animals were pooping. And it had to be an effort for him, too. He had to climb inside the foreign, scary, noise-making thing, something he normally wouldn't do even if a beloved toy was in there.
It's not a doggie Einstein moment, you rocket surgeon dog owners may not be impressed... but it's the smartest thing I have ever personally seen a dog do.
It was also hilarious!
Here in Seattle, the Twitter outage has LED the all of the news segments on morning radio. At least on the station I listen to.
It almost made me miss the OJ Simpson news overload. At leas that was _kind of_ interesting, it was a murder trial.
For my own sanity, I wish Twitter a speedy recovery, or an atomic strike to get rid of it forever.
If we can get the guy who designed the networking control panel in WinCE to show up, I'll invite myself along.
I'll even pay for your birthday.
Your birthday at the Microsoft Store.
With "throw the chair at the pinata" games.
Oh, yes.
It's interesting times, when I, a long-time Apple fan, choose to use my old Zune* to play MP3s instead of my iPhone.**
If you do things the Apple way, the iPhone works well as an MP3 player. But try to deviate from The Way, and it lashes out with retard strength to punish you. (I clicked no, don't sync, I'M SORRY I CONNECTED YOU TO MY WORK COMPUTER, PLEASE DON'T SYNC, and you delete content from my iPhone anyway?)
The Zune, on the other hand, is eager to please with features like guest mode so you can use it on multiple computers... but sometimes, it craps itself when it's giving you a hug and you have to delete and rebuild the library data.
When the Zune dies, which won't be long as it has started to randomly reboot, I need to find a MP3 player with a large hard disk and a lobotomy, that just works as a USB mass storage device.
* I swear to God, it was a gift.
** Which I only bought because refurbs were available at that time and I could hack it to work with my current ATT plan. At full price? No thanks.
Once again, we are really seeing the difference between Russian and American engineering culture.
When it came time to develop a toilet for the ISS, NASA ended up running with an absurdly complicated $91 million dollar model designed by Lockheed-Martin (certain subsystems were provided by Raytheon).
The toilet has over 1500 moving parts, consumes 800W of power when in use, and took one hundred engineers six years to manufacture. Despite this impressive pedigree, the toilet remains a fussy piece of equipment. To this day peanuts and certain other troublesome foods are actually prohibited on the ISS.
The Russians, of course, just used a pencil.
(Well, none of that is true, but I never let that stop a good story and neither should you.)
I have some IBM 5100s if you're interested.
I am a game designer. And whenever anyone tells me they want to be a game designer, I tell them what a cop once told me back when I was in high school and wanted to be a cop. "Be a fireman instead." You like games? Maybe stick with playing them, instead of seeing how the sausage is made.
Game designer is a job that has the potential to become extremely crummy. It also has the potential to be extremely rewarding. You'll hit both extremes. In a good job, the highs outweigh the lows. Good design jobs are hard to come by. Most games aren't finished and shipped.
How do you become a designer? The question is hard to answer neatly, because there are many different "design" positions in the industry. My company has design specialties that don't exist at other companies. A highly marketable designer is flexible.
Many, even most designers have NO developer experience. You don't need to know C++ to create a good first-person shooter level with the Unreal editor. If you are designing a game system, like how some kind of a card game works, or the way your shields regenerate, you don't necessarily need to know programming for that either.
But for any designer, having familiarity with programming is VERY useful though. When you work with an engineer to bring a system to life you have an understanding of what is realistic to ask for.
Though you don't need to be a programmer, most design jobs do require some kind of scripting, or at least content creation using hacky, ugly, unfriendly tools. You don't need to be an engineer, but you do usually need to be technical.
That all said, if you are a whiz designer who is also a developer, that is an excellent skill set to have. Even so, you might not do much programming in a design position. It depends on where you are and how they do things.
A company local to me does mostly FPS games. I know someone there, and he says that basically all the designers are level designers. That means grinding away in a 3d editor plus scripting language, making playable spaces. They do not seem to have designer/developer hybrids. Seems like you are one or the other there, mostly. Other places might not have such a division.
Then, take a company that does MMOs. They have designers who just do the game's story. You sit around and dream up factions and NPCs and make flow charts of missions, and collaborate with level designers to make the whole package work. Maybe you write the NPCs' lines, too, and collaborate with concept artists. No programming there.
In some companies, the engineers don't have much to do with the design. The design staff says, "it works like this" and the engineers make it happen--if it's reasonable. If the engineer is design-minded, it can be a fun collaboration. Or, management can keep devs and designers apart with barbed wire. I have seen it work both ways.
Then, sometimes there is that guy who is a designer and is fully capable of implementing his designs in executable code... if the company structure allows for it.
So in the end, programming games does not necessarily mean designing games, and designing games definitely doesn't mean you have to be a programmer. It depends very much on the team you are in.
Back to the original question... what should you do?
Make games. Use the editors and mod tools that are out there, and create some playable stuff. Or start doing paper games and making friends play them. If you are not doing something online, try to get a paper game in print, even if it's a small run and self-funded. Like an artist, you need a portfolio. If you can create material that is fun while you develop your technical skills, you are on the right path.
What technical skills are useful? At my office I see C++, ActionScript/Flash, and SQL stored procedures. Scripting languages I see a lot of include Lua and Unreal's Kismet, but there are many options.
Your "build" can emphasize either design or programming, but honestly being a whiz at both is the best. Helps if you can write, too, but it's rarely sought after.
Then, you just need to find a way to get to the top of the resume pile... but that's a different story.
It's on.
I was going to think up a clever reply decrying the state of copyright law, which prevents us from sharing this moldy old story for discussion.
But then I got depressed about it, and lost the motivation to be clever.
But thanks for the info--I will certainly look this story up. I know Clarke, in general, but I am unfamiliar with this one.
Killerspiele -- I think I found my new TF2 handle.
Will AT&T charge extra?
Will the sun come up tomorrow?
Even if a pharma company was handed the cure for a rare disease on a silver platter, they might not choose to sell it because there is still a cost to put it on the market. You have to set up a production line, print packaging, etc etc.
If the government was handing out cures for diseases right and left, I think you'd have to mandate that the companies receiving the "gifts" would have to offer the no-profit or at-loss cures in order to sell the ones that they COULD make money on. But I'd be ok with forcing compliance that way.
Or because you are too evil to accept nature's harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube.
...but because we as a species have a difficult time trusting in a 'higher power' to save us.
It seems more like we have a problem trusting a moderately higher power. Put God or the President in the cockpit and at least half the passengers would be perfectly content. But no one completely trusts invisible Captain Bob.
No more catching the show on the distant TV station because your local one won't carry it. It's a shame.
I don't miss it. Today we'd illegally download the show. More fun and better picture quality!
... The husband was a tool and die maker in the auto industry, and both the husband and wife considered it their patriotic duty to invest in America.
Wow. A patriotic investment portfolio is even dumber than patriotic car buying.
If I have a patriotic duty to my nation's companies, that duty is to keep them strong and healthy. But blindly supporting your national industries does NOT keep them strong. Ask more of them. Make them compete. Make them innovate. Make them EARN your business. If they can't do that, they do not deserve your support.
If you buy in anyway out of loyalty, you are helping to build a house of cards and in the long run that helps no one. Except for some company executives, anyway.
The franchise has touched upon issues like capital punishment, homosexuality, evaluation of moral perspective, discrimination and bias, tradition vs. progression.
I liked the new movie and consider it good Star Trek.
OK, it didn't have the social commentary of the half black/half white face guys, but it did have a genocide. I'll admit they didn't talk about it much, because they were busy shooting. But they did at least touch on how it changed some of the characters. Message: Genocide is bad.
Wrath of Khan, which I also consider good Trek, also did not spend a lot of time on its moral message. "Don't play God" was the lesson there for anyone who cared to look past the basic revenge story and sweet space battles.
The recent Trek movies didn't provide good action OR good stories... so we're still ahead of the game with the reboot!
Which kinds of files can you copy to the Kindle over USB without needing some kind of conversion process?
We've seen some keen devices, like the Kindle, hampered by their crappy software.
Likewise, the Sony Reader... I have one, and for the $50 it cost me as part of a credit card signup gimmick, I love it. But before I can spend a few hundred bucks on another similar item, it has GOT to be easier to use. Sony's desktop software is poor, and converting other formats for the device is a pain in the rear.
Please, Samsung... Let this thing mount like a USB storage device. Teach it to understand txt, rtf, html, pdb, pdf, and maybe even chm--WITHOUT needing to do any conversion on my computer. And add in whatever DRM-infested format you want on top of it, fine... but please, make a product that's for readers and not PUBLISHERS.
(I have ancient Pocket PC ebook reading software that transparently handles displaying text in all of these formats, even inside zip files. It ain't rocket surgery.
Right now the closest thing to an uber-reader, for my needs, is this thing. Spiffy, but if someone beats them on price, I'd be there.
http://www.bookeen.com/specs/ebook-software.aspx)
Done right, and for short haul travel, rail is way better than air travel. What you lose in sheer speed of the plane, is more than made up for, by the time saved by not getting to the airport, checkin, luggage screening, and that sort of thing.
If trains do make some kind of comeback, I think we will have the same kind of "security" features there as we do for air travel.
Security theater is just getting warmed up.
Procedural mistakes should not overturn convictions that are this overwhelming.
You may as well say that procedural requirements should not interfere with the business of national security.
Procedures and the laws that enforce them are what make our pretty decent free society possible. Sometimes a procedural error results in a dismissal, and justice is not done. It sucks, but IMHO that is an unavoidable side effect of building a system that protects the innocent.
The alternative is a system where procedures are ignored when it is convenient, which has got to be worse.
Not that I disagree... but to play Devil's advocate I would point out that North Korea has this very strong cultural desire for self-dependence. Even if they could buy a launch cheaper, they might just want to do it themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
I guess by "they" I mean "him" though. The people aren't the ones making the decisions there.
Merit pay for teachers would probably derive from some new standardized test for the students. Which, as you said, is a bad idea.
The standardized tests in schools always become a big deal consuming resources and attention to the exclusion of some other important lessons. So, in the process of trying to do something good, they'll screw up the system even more, and reward teachers who are best at gaming the system.