As one of "the burnouts", I can attest to the underlying truth of this post. The crunch is inevitable, it damages whatever relationship you have at the time. Schedules are pretty rough in games. With that said... You're young and energetic... You've got time to play with, a lot of energy and lessons to learn - it isn't really going to cost you a whole lot to do that now (and you'll have more fun doing it now). Spend some time in the industry. It was what I did out of school and while I would probably never go back to it, I certainly don't regret the time I spent there. I am a better software developer for it.
The pitfalls I find most game programmers fall into are: "nothing else is this fun" or "nothing else requires this much skill" or "I'm no longer qualified for anything else". Absolutely untrue! When the time comes, don't be afraid to pack up your bags and leave. It is generally true that people not in the games industry don't recognize that games are pretty complex systems and will tend to trivialize them as "kids stuff"... But if you can make it through to getting a couple games "on the shelf", chances are you could easily prove your competence to the "suits".
I left the game industry because I found the person I wanted to marry and I wanted to settle down and have kids. It's pretty rough maintaining a healthy relationship like that when you're spending 8+ weeks / year in crunch (I hear from some folks working at blizzard north that the Diablo 2 crunch lasted quite a few months). I was rather surprised with the results of my "new boring job": It paid better. I got more respect. Crunch time was short (on the order of a few days to a week before a tradeshow). The work was very challenging. I have worked with a dizzying variety of technologies. And I have better mobility - which is important if you want options when deciding where to buy a house and set down your roots. This was not The same old thing day in and day out I was led to believe would become my life if I ever left the games industry.
Start surfing the web sites of game companies with product on the shelves and look for employment opportunity links there. Even if you don't see a job for which you are qualified, email them regardless - and be upfront about the fact that you enjoy games, which of your studies are relevant to games and see what happens. Since you are in Mass right now you'll probably be getting phone interviews at the start.
What is really scary, at least to me, is that the government is legally standing on pretty solid ground.
Reading through their argument, they refer back to the DMCA and contend that it is illegal to offer, import, trade, etc. a technology primarily designed to circumvent the technological measures designed to protect a copyrighted material. I would think that a good defense would be that DeCSS has the primary design of allowing people with the legal right to view a DVD the ability to do so with open source software.
The DMCA outlaws the public transaction of knowledge of information not associated with national security... that is just wrong. This whole situation needs a serious dose of civil disobedience. <Fanatical rant>Everybody post DeCSS on your web site as a stand against corporate tyranny!</Fanatical rant>
There is another school of thought on this subject:
Years ago when I was an Amiga developer (tells you just how many years ago) I knew some of the people working on the CD32 project (or at least some who claimed to be, I just took their word for it). As part of their research they performed a patent search to see if they had anything they could patent or if there were any patents they might be infringing on.
While reading through the "hits" they got, it occurred to several of them that many of the patents filed by the big guys (Sony, Philips, and other major players in the CD realm) were unenforceable as they contained obvious prior art. However the USPTO was granting the patents because it was more important, at least at that time, to ensure that the information was publicly available than to play guessing games as to whether or not said "invention" really merits a patent.
I think one of the fundamental issues of patent law that we have drifted away from - in the interest of corporate easement - is that patents are supposed to be easy to obtain and difficult to defend. The PTO is supposed to add to society's pool of knowledge. The problem is that they are granting patents to "obvious" solutions. And corporations are mis-using patents trying to predict what facet of technology will be en vogue over the next couple of years and putting a patent on it not for "public dislosure" but so that they can collect royalties without actually inventing anything.
Value Meaning
http:/ Use the HTTP protocol to access.
posta.tumbleweed.com Name of the HTTP server.
cgi/posta.dll Name of HTTP server extension.
pu = 0 Don't use a password.
233 Store item Identifier.
33982 Recipient Identifier.
FIAAAV4 Key to access the document.
(My apologies for not being sufficiently familiar with slash to format that correctly - for some reason I can't use the "pre" tag) It looks to me like what they've patented here is passing arguments to a cgi application on a web server in order to retrieve data from that server and logging the transaction. Surely there is art prior to 1997 for that?
Broadly interpretted this patent pretty much covers retrieving any page via CGI that is not otherwise accessible and causes a log to be generated for such.
Why don't you just tell us what you consider "Rudimentary physics". We're all waiting to hear you mention "Newton's Laws" (of motion) to prove that you don't really know what you are talking about and that your argument about the impossibility of the big bang is baseless.
There are valid arguments against the big bang. I don't subscribe to them, and I don't think that you know them - especially since they require knowledge of much more than rudimentary laws of physics. (or are you know going to tell us that QED is "rudimentary"?)
Hmmm, so let me see if I got this straight... The company spends its money to train and educate you, and now you are experiencing engineering work you complain that the company doesn't keep spending its money on you?
I know it may be difficult to believe, but a lot of engineering is spent doing menial chores... like testing and validation. Very few find themselves perpetually at the forefront of "cool" new technology.
You are fortunate! You look older than you are. When I started programming professionally I was 18 and looked 15. It wasn't until I was 24 that someone correctly guessed that I was over 18.
Proven or not I had a terrible time commanding respect when I was 23 (and still looking like I belonged in High School). Even with a great track record, people wanted to dole out responsibility based on apparent age. I had to wait until I was 27 before I would openly be allowed to provide technical leadership to a team - Having finally gained the appearance that it was possible I could have at least graduated college.
Argue semantics with someone else. It seems everytime one makes some argument on the GPL and distribution somebody brings up that you can always use the GPL protected code and not distribute your new creation if you don't want it under the GPL as well. I think common sense should have made obvious the fact that I was talking about code intended to be redistributed one way or another (read the parent).
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
This means that linking to a GPL program or any portion of a GPL program requires that your software also be covered under the GPL (Yes, I am aware that if identifiable sections of your work are not derived from the GPL software, and can be reasonably considered independent yadda yadda yadda). This is why the LGPL was brought into existence, and this is what I maintain is an unenforceable clause. Any modifications to the original code certainly have to be released GPL, but linking is another matter. But we'll never find out until somebody has the time and interest to drag this sort of stuff through litigation.
Oh, and just so that you don't go playing semantics again, this means linking your software intended for redistribution.
All he had to do was require that a GPL'd base class be included in all assignments, and everything would be forced under the GPL! He told me he was going to do this, no matter what verdict he school returned. This is just one of the reasons I hate the GPL.
I really wish somebody with the time to drag this one through the system would challenge this. I've yet to hear one legal expert seriously believe that requiring all products that link through any means to a GPL piece of code must place themselves under GPL'd. There are a whole host of reasons why... However since GPL bashing would offend The Unslashdot Activities Committee, I'll leave it at that.
In the example given (which is the way it is often played in a classroom - 10 rounds), defecting makes sense only in round 10. Defecting in round 9 will yield the same result for the winner as cooperating from start to finish (assuming his opponent isn't going to play nice once screwed). So there really is no incentive to defect before the final round.
Therefore to win you merely have to convince your opponent that you are going to go with the flow so that you both "come out winners" - and screw him at the end.
Have the web CGI/ASP/JSP application store the information in a database. Then use something like MS Access & Excel or another similar tool to pull the data out (via ODBC or whatever) when producing the spreadsheet.
Nonsense. This moralistic teaching of cooperation is easily undermined. Winning more skittle than the next guy is fairly easy:
Cooperate with the other person the first nine rounds. You win 27 skittles.
Screw that person the last round, you win 32 skittles, other person has 28
You win
That's the moral extreme this game teaches. How clever, we've learned that by winning another persons trust and then exploiting it, we can get ahead! Not to mention that you could also win 30 points by simply using opposite strategies each round. If you're really lucky your partner can't eat skittles for religious reasons and chooses "cooperate" everytime so that you end up with 50 points.
IIRC posting an encrypted message to a mailing list requires everyone on that mailing list to have the corresponding decryption key. If somebody on the list is compromised, chances are pretty good the intruder will be able to locate that key one way or another - perhaps as clear text in an initial "welcome aboard" email?
Using PGP would probably be most effective at preventing a cracker forging a message to the list, I am not sure I see it as protecting the list.
Back when nvidia was the new kid on the 3D Accelerated card block, 3DfX sued them for alleged patent infringements. It was a serious charge back then - big companies can kill little companies with petty litigation regardless of its validity. I know I was fuming because I had just purchased a couple TNT cards because they blew the doors off of Voodoo2 (at least for Quake2). I didn't want to find myself with an unsupported chipset because some behemoth steamrolled the chip maker.
Fast forward a few years... nvidia pretty much has dominated the high end spectrum of fast 3D cards for the consumer market. 3Dfx is having a terrible time just staying afloat. They're having trouble stemming the flow of red ink. And what happens? nVidia hits them with a patent infringement lawsuit. 3dfx, of course, vowed to vigorously defend itself... but really they just could not afford the cost of that sort of legal battle.
A few weeks later, 3dfx files for chapter 11 protection. We all sort of jumped up and down shouting Serves 'em right!, but it was really just another example of how corporations pick on one another.
Management doesn't usually listen to a junior engineer who says the system needs to be redesigned. Chances are they have a senior engineer who is already saying something and trying to echo it up to an Architect or CTO who has some sway.
That isn't a nice thing, but it is the truth. Lower management wants to avoid the ire of higher management. Generally they are going to say something to the effect of "Just get this one item working" because just that one piece will take a fraction of the time it would take to redesign the system. Does it matter that they are going to lose the time taken to redesign and then some over the course of months? No, it doesn't.
Ultimately there is someone who wants the software and they want it now, and they are not going to tolerate having to wait two months while the infrastructure is refactored. You can show upper management all the supporting evidence you want, but if doing this is going to seriously impact their short term cash flow (or any number of analogous tangible items) then they are going to want to hear how a bandaid fix can be implemented.
Yes it sucks, yes I live it. One skill that moves you up that Junior to Senior ladder is your skill at finding interesting bandages to treat a sick project.
If I read the article correctly, they don't turn off the 1080i signal, they turn off the 1080i signal being sent through the analog output. Their worry is that you could plug an HDTV analog signal into an HDTV analog recorder (which the article says is not yet available) and get a perfect copy of the movie.
I would assume this means there is also a "digital" output which would plug directly into your HDTV.
If Sun weren't so protective of Java, Microsoft would have already exercised its extend and embrace muscle and made a proprietary version of Java that only worked on Windows.
That's what started this fight in the first place, Microsoft started making proprietary extensions to its version of Java which produced apps which only ran on its OS. Sun didn't want Microsoft putting the Java logo on such a mongrel.
Even the person who came up with the 8% claim knows its full of crap:
Mills defends his 8 percent figure by saying that it's only an estimate: "The total may be somewhere between 5 percent and 6 percent. Our number is an estimate. No one knows for sure. We know it's not zero. That's why the whole debate is sort of silly in a way, if you're focusing on a few percentage points."
(emphasis added is mine) This is a comment clearly intended for the mathematically challenged. If Mills estimates 8 percent, and the true number is 5 percent, then his estimates for total power consumption fo the net were inflated by 60% of the true value. I don't call that "a few percentage points", I call that "wildly inaccurate".
If we're looking for something to blame for the high power usage in California (and this has been mentioned before in other threads) - it's people leaving their machines at work on all night long. I work at a company that is heavily invested in distributed n-tier solutions. I have 3 computers in my cubicle. About 1/3 of our employees have more than 1 computer in their cube/office. I am the only person I know of who completely powers down at the end of the day here. Most people can't even be bothered to turn off their monitors.
I'd like to think that the place I work is an exceptionally inconsiderate environment, but from my unscientifically collected reports from friends at other places, this is pretty much the norm in the industry. Leaving the computer on overnight supposedly saves you a few minutes power up time the next day (I don't see why, I usually hit the power buttons, then go get my coffee. When I'm back they are waiting for me to log on).
I think the only way we arrogant Californians are going to wake up and start conserving is if not conserving starts hurting us in a noticeable fashion. They keep threatening blackouts, but only a few have actually happened (more people lost power from the storm that blew in than from rolling blackouts). They need to stop warning and start doing since nobody is taking the hint.
Slashdot Mirror
As one of "the burnouts", I can attest to the underlying truth of this post. The crunch is inevitable, it damages whatever relationship you have at the time. Schedules are pretty rough in games. With that said... You're young and energetic... You've got time to play with, a lot of energy and lessons to learn - it isn't really going to cost you a whole lot to do that now (and you'll have more fun doing it now). Spend some time in the industry. It was what I did out of school and while I would probably never go back to it, I certainly don't regret the time I spent there. I am a better software developer for it.
The pitfalls I find most game programmers fall into are: "nothing else is this fun" or "nothing else requires this much skill" or "I'm no longer qualified for anything else". Absolutely untrue! When the time comes, don't be afraid to pack up your bags and leave. It is generally true that people not in the games industry don't recognize that games are pretty complex systems and will tend to trivialize them as "kids stuff"... But if you can make it through to getting a couple games "on the shelf", chances are you could easily prove your competence to the "suits".
I left the game industry because I found the person I wanted to marry and I wanted to settle down and have kids. It's pretty rough maintaining a healthy relationship like that when you're spending 8+ weeks / year in crunch (I hear from some folks working at blizzard north that the Diablo 2 crunch lasted quite a few months). I was rather surprised with the results of my "new boring job": It paid better. I got more respect. Crunch time was short (on the order of a few days to a week before a tradeshow). The work was very challenging. I have worked with a dizzying variety of technologies. And I have better mobility - which is important if you want options when deciding where to buy a house and set down your roots. This was not The same old thing day in and day out I was led to believe would become my life if I ever left the games industry.
Start surfing the web sites of game companies with product on the shelves and look for employment opportunity links there. Even if you don't see a job for which you are qualified, email them regardless - and be upfront about the fact that you enjoy games, which of your studies are relevant to games and see what happens. Since you are in Mass right now you'll probably be getting phone interviews at the start.
What is really scary, at least to me, is that the government is legally standing on pretty solid ground.
Reading through their argument, they refer back to the DMCA and contend that it is illegal to offer, import, trade, etc. a technology primarily designed to circumvent the technological measures designed to protect a copyrighted material. I would think that a good defense would be that DeCSS has the primary design of allowing people with the legal right to view a DVD the ability to do so with open source software.
The DMCA outlaws the public transaction of knowledge of information not associated with national security... that is just wrong. This whole situation needs a serious dose of civil disobedience. <Fanatical rant>Everybody post DeCSS on your web site as a stand against corporate tyranny!</Fanatical rant>
There is another school of thought on this subject:
Years ago when I was an Amiga developer (tells you just how many years ago) I knew some of the people working on the CD32 project (or at least some who claimed to be, I just took their word for it). As part of their research they performed a patent search to see if they had anything they could patent or if there were any patents they might be infringing on.
While reading through the "hits" they got, it occurred to several of them that many of the patents filed by the big guys (Sony, Philips, and other major players in the CD realm) were unenforceable as they contained obvious prior art. However the USPTO was granting the patents because it was more important, at least at that time, to ensure that the information was publicly available than to play guessing games as to whether or not said "invention" really merits a patent.
I think one of the fundamental issues of patent law that we have drifted away from - in the interest of corporate easement - is that patents are supposed to be easy to obtain and difficult to defend. The PTO is supposed to add to society's pool of knowledge. The problem is that they are granting patents to "obvious" solutions. And corporations are mis-using patents trying to predict what facet of technology will be en vogue over the next couple of years and putting a patent on it not for "public dislosure" but so that they can collect royalties without actually inventing anything.
Some interesting stuff I found within the patent text (PURL stands for... you guessed it, Private URL):
(My apologies for not being sufficiently familiar with slash to format that correctly - for some reason I can't use the "pre" tag) It looks to me like what they've patented here is passing arguments to a cgi application on a web server in order to retrieve data from that server and logging the transaction. Surely there is art prior to 1997 for that?
Broadly interpretted this patent pretty much covers retrieving any page via CGI that is not otherwise accessible and causes a log to be generated for such.
Why don't you just tell us what you consider "Rudimentary physics". We're all waiting to hear you mention "Newton's Laws" (of motion) to prove that you don't really know what you are talking about and that your argument about the impossibility of the big bang is baseless.
There are valid arguments against the big bang. I don't subscribe to them, and I don't think that you know them - especially since they require knowledge of much more than rudimentary laws of physics. (or are you know going to tell us that QED is "rudimentary"?)
Hmmm, so let me see if I got this straight... The company spends its money to train and educate you, and now you are experiencing engineering work you complain that the company doesn't keep spending its money on you?
I know it may be difficult to believe, but a lot of engineering is spent doing menial chores... like testing and validation. Very few find themselves perpetually at the forefront of "cool" new technology.
Is this guy just registering a lot of sucks domains? The owner of wiposucks.com was the defendant who won the case here.
You are fortunate! You look older than you are. When I started programming professionally I was 18 and looked 15. It wasn't until I was 24 that someone correctly guessed that I was over 18.
Proven or not I had a terrible time commanding respect when I was 23 (and still looking like I belonged in High School). Even with a great track record, people wanted to dole out responsibility based on apparent age. I had to wait until I was 27 before I would openly be allowed to provide technical leadership to a team - Having finally gained the appearance that it was possible I could have at least graduated college.
Argue semantics with someone else. It seems everytime one makes some argument on the GPL and distribution somebody brings up that you can always use the GPL protected code and not distribute your new creation if you don't want it under the GPL as well. I think common sense should have made obvious the fact that I was talking about code intended to be redistributed one way or another (read the parent).
Let's read from the GPL section 2b:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
This means that linking to a GPL program or any portion of a GPL program requires that your software also be covered under the GPL (Yes, I am aware that if identifiable sections of your work are not derived from the GPL software, and can be reasonably considered independent yadda yadda yadda). This is why the LGPL was brought into existence, and this is what I maintain is an unenforceable clause. Any modifications to the original code certainly have to be released GPL, but linking is another matter. But we'll never find out until somebody has the time and interest to drag this sort of stuff through litigation.
Oh, and just so that you don't go playing semantics again, this means linking your software intended for redistribution.
I really wish somebody with the time to drag this one through the system would challenge this. I've yet to hear one legal expert seriously believe that requiring all products that link through any means to a GPL piece of code must place themselves under GPL'd. There are a whole host of reasons why... However since GPL bashing would offend The Unslashdot Activities Committee, I'll leave it at that.
Bind is obscure and uninteresting? What sort of wannabe nerd are you?
In the example given (which is the way it is often played in a classroom - 10 rounds), defecting makes sense only in round 10. Defecting in round 9 will yield the same result for the winner as cooperating from start to finish (assuming his opponent isn't going to play nice once screwed). So there really is no incentive to defect before the final round.
Therefore to win you merely have to convince your opponent that you are going to go with the flow so that you both "come out winners" - and screw him at the end.
Have the web CGI/ASP/JSP application store the information in a database. Then use something like MS Access & Excel or another similar tool to pull the data out (via ODBC or whatever) when producing the spreadsheet.
Nonsense. This moralistic teaching of cooperation is easily undermined. Winning more skittle than the next guy is fairly easy:
That's the moral extreme this game teaches. How clever, we've learned that by winning another persons trust and then exploiting it, we can get ahead! Not to mention that you could also win 30 points by simply using opposite strategies each round. If you're really lucky your partner can't eat skittles for religious reasons and chooses "cooperate" everytime so that you end up with 50 points.
IIRC posting an encrypted message to a mailing list requires everyone on that mailing list to have the corresponding decryption key. If somebody on the list is compromised, chances are pretty good the intruder will be able to locate that key one way or another - perhaps as clear text in an initial "welcome aboard" email?
Using PGP would probably be most effective at preventing a cracker forging a message to the list, I am not sure I see it as protecting the list.
Ahhh, wouldn't be the first time.
Back when nvidia was the new kid on the 3D Accelerated card block, 3DfX sued them for alleged patent infringements. It was a serious charge back then - big companies can kill little companies with petty litigation regardless of its validity. I know I was fuming because I had just purchased a couple TNT cards because they blew the doors off of Voodoo2 (at least for Quake2). I didn't want to find myself with an unsupported chipset because some behemoth steamrolled the chip maker.
Fast forward a few years... nvidia pretty much has dominated the high end spectrum of fast 3D cards for the consumer market. 3Dfx is having a terrible time just staying afloat. They're having trouble stemming the flow of red ink. And what happens? nVidia hits them with a patent infringement lawsuit. 3dfx, of course, vowed to vigorously defend itself... but really they just could not afford the cost of that sort of legal battle.
A few weeks later, 3dfx files for chapter 11 protection. We all sort of jumped up and down shouting Serves 'em right!, but it was really just another example of how corporations pick on one another.
Management doesn't usually listen to a junior engineer who says the system needs to be redesigned. Chances are they have a senior engineer who is already saying something and trying to echo it up to an Architect or CTO who has some sway.
That isn't a nice thing, but it is the truth. Lower management wants to avoid the ire of higher management. Generally they are going to say something to the effect of "Just get this one item working" because just that one piece will take a fraction of the time it would take to redesign the system. Does it matter that they are going to lose the time taken to redesign and then some over the course of months? No, it doesn't.
Ultimately there is someone who wants the software and they want it now, and they are not going to tolerate having to wait two months while the infrastructure is refactored. You can show upper management all the supporting evidence you want, but if doing this is going to seriously impact their short term cash flow (or any number of analogous tangible items) then they are going to want to hear how a bandaid fix can be implemented.
Yes it sucks, yes I live it. One skill that moves you up that Junior to Senior ladder is your skill at finding interesting bandages to treat a sick project.
If I read the article correctly, they don't turn off the 1080i signal, they turn off the 1080i signal being sent through the analog output. Their worry is that you could plug an HDTV analog signal into an HDTV analog recorder (which the article says is not yet available) and get a perfect copy of the movie.
I would assume this means there is also a "digital" output which would plug directly into your HDTV.
If Sun weren't so protective of Java, Microsoft would have already exercised its extend and embrace muscle and made a proprietary version of Java that only worked on Windows.
That's what started this fight in the first place, Microsoft started making proprietary extensions to its version of Java which produced apps which only ran on its OS. Sun didn't want Microsoft putting the Java logo on such a mongrel.
Even the person who came up with the 8% claim knows its full of crap:
Mills defends his 8 percent figure by saying that it's only an estimate: "The total may be somewhere between 5 percent and 6 percent. Our number is an estimate. No one knows for sure. We know it's not zero. That's why the whole debate is sort of silly in a way, if you're focusing on a few percentage points."
(emphasis added is mine) This is a comment clearly intended for the mathematically challenged. If Mills estimates 8 percent, and the true number is 5 percent, then his estimates for total power consumption fo the net were inflated by 60% of the true value. I don't call that "a few percentage points", I call that "wildly inaccurate".
If we're looking for something to blame for the high power usage in California (and this has been mentioned before in other threads) - it's people leaving their machines at work on all night long. I work at a company that is heavily invested in distributed n-tier solutions. I have 3 computers in my cubicle. About 1/3 of our employees have more than 1 computer in their cube/office. I am the only person I know of who completely powers down at the end of the day here. Most people can't even be bothered to turn off their monitors.
I'd like to think that the place I work is an exceptionally inconsiderate environment, but from my unscientifically collected reports from friends at other places, this is pretty much the norm in the industry. Leaving the computer on overnight supposedly saves you a few minutes power up time the next day (I don't see why, I usually hit the power buttons, then go get my coffee. When I'm back they are waiting for me to log on).
I think the only way we arrogant Californians are going to wake up and start conserving is if not conserving starts hurting us in a noticeable fashion. They keep threatening blackouts, but only a few have actually happened (more people lost power from the storm that blew in than from rolling blackouts). They need to stop warning and start doing since nobody is taking the hint.
You're right, it should have been at 3 or 4 with the label "Funny" next to it.