I gave Unity a fair try--4 weeks. It killed my performance. I could never find my scrollbars, and the hideaway menus were extremely annoying. Honestly, the reason I don't have an Apple system is because I. Cannot. Stand. Apple's. Interface. When I use my computer I want to be productive, not masturbate to beautiful icons.
I have been a big Ubuntu fan for a long time, but if they want to force me to use the crap called Unity, then I'm gone.
and they'll do anything they can to try to stuff the genie back in the bottle, including abrogating our most cherished Constitutional rights. Everyone knows now, with no hearsay or he said, she said, how incompetent and compromised the American government is. You can't go back from there without at least a massive wave of reform. But Obama, the current Congress, and the SCOTUS have no interest in that whatsoever.
We are past the event horizon of a second American Revolution. The question is exactly how long and what form it will take.
And that's what I told my friend who is head of programming at Starz: People want to have a reasonably priced streaming service that lets them watch what they want, when they want. So if you guys on the content side keep putting the screws to Netflix then both of you will lose because people will conclude Torrents are the only way to go.
And if they're thinking that they're going to "crack down on filesharing" to prevent that then they are smoking unhealthy amounts of crack, because I have friends and acquaintances who regularly offer me thumbs and external hard drives with ungodly amounts of media on them. Go ahead, *IAA, try to sniff those packets.
Think you deal with multi-variate systems? Compared to social scientists, no you don't. Think it's devilishly difficult designing a testable environment from which you can draw falsifiable conclusions? Try doing that with test subjects that have a will of their own, that you're also not allowed to dissect and examine afterward, nor abuse during the experiment (through oxygen deprivation, freezing, etc).
Social scientists use the same tools "real" scientists use, that is, math, statistics, computers, and other equipment, and they use them with equal skill and rigor. The difference is "real" scientists can blow things up, kill numberless lower life forms, disassemble systems, hold arbitrary things constant, and employ many, many other tricks that social scientists are unable or not permitted to use. Heck, even the Milgram guy shocked people with his experiments even though what he did was only playing head games with his subjects.
So the next time you're in your lab blending up a bunch of fruit flies to extract their DNA and looking down your nose at the "soft" scientists who "play" at doing experiments, consider how easy it would be to do science with both hands and feet tied behind your back while blindfolded.
Amen! I have also considered trains for domestic travel or boats for international, if first traveling to Canada to fly isn't feasible. The only way I will ever fly in this country again is if
A) the government is overthrown and freedom is restored B) I get obscenely rich and build my own luxury dirigible/sky yacht
Like a guy who has no life, no family, and no clue. If you do have a life and a family then you're doubly damned because you ought to have a clue.
First, the programmers you get overseas aren't worth the penny you spend on them. I have managed many projects with overseas coding teams and they're all nightmares. They don't speak the language. They don't share your culture. They don't share your timezone. They don't understand professional standards. The ink isn't dry on their software certificates and it won't dry before they've jumped to another outsourcing company, so any time you spend building up effective communication is wasted.
Second, relocation sounds easy to a college kid who spent a semester abroad in Spain, drinking and picking up girls. It's rather less simple when you're a bona fide adult trying to take a job away from a local. The bureaucratic red tape you have to hack through to even get a work visa is insane. And that's for countries that like us. So speaking the language and having spent 2 weeks at Club Med: Bali does not for an easy transition make.
Third, got a wife and kids? Got brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, friends you like? Dropping them like a rock to chase an outsourced job overseas is not going to make you popular in your domicile.
Or maybe you're an MBA who thinks he's immune to being hoisted on his own petard. Well, huh, you've got a shock coming to you in the near future, my friend. Remember all those Indian, Chinese, Latino, etc. folks you drank beers with while skipping Corporate Finance 101? They're positioning themselves to get your job outsourced to them in Bangalore where they can live like kings. I have seen the wave of stuff like this happening in New York, and it fills me with a gentle, happy glow.
That's a bit harsh about Slashdot--it still has a more educated and informed audience than the average bear and does a fairly decent job of bubbling up informative posts. I've been visiting the site since it started (though I lost my first UID and belatedly registered another before I realized how many cool points I was burning as UID's incremented ever higher) and the general quality has not changed that much. Though I never minded him that much, some would argue Slashdot's quality is even higher now than it was when Jon Katz was around.
That said, I do rather share your frustration with the bleating pussies that seem to populate our country in ever greater numbers. Watching my neighbors in New York shit themselves over a 16mph wind and slight mist last weekend convinced me our country is galloping toward a precipice.
Bring back the daring dreamers, I say. I want my kids to play with chemistry sets that could burn or poison them if they do it wrong. I want them coming back in the house at the end of the day dirty, with scrapes, tired, with giant grins on their faces.
If we wrap everyone and everything in bubblewrap they'll never take risks, and if they never take risks they'll never learn and never do marvelous things.
I saw a feature on Discovery Channel a while back about solar-powered CO2 extractors. It makes me wonder if you could spin that into carbon fibers directly and produce vacuum formed or injection molded composites for a wide variety of applications.
Carbon is such a versatile element that it would be fantastic to mine it from the air and bend it to whatever use you have while lowering atmospheric CO2 levels; kills two birds with one stone.
I am young, but I have an implanted defibrillator. Looking at me, you wouldn't know it. So I wonder if that's a point of demarcation between what we consider a cyborg and what we don't. With a prosthetic arm you know you're augmented, and everyone else does too. They treat you differently, you see yourself differently. But it's conceivable you could be far more augmented than a person with a replacement arm and never think about that fact. Does that make you more or less human, more or less cyborg, if the social dimension of your augmentation is different?
in the last 10 years. The hysteria that the "News" is whipping up is much more dangerous than a little wind and rain.
We live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty, and yet the mouth-breathers were still panicking and fighting over bottled water in the supermarket. Can Fox News, CNN, and the others be held criminally liable for inciting to riot, because that's exactly what they're doing.
Here's a thought: one of the feared aspects of a hurricane is lots of rain, which conveniently means if you want fresh water you can put a pot out your window and catch yourself some. And as far as food goes, most Americans are so fat they could live on their paunches for at least a month before they need to eat again.
of entertainment. That's right. We're at the dawn of the age when real artistry will express itself through games. Some titles have already shown the potential (Half Life, Enslaved, Shadow of the Colossus, etc). But as players and designers learn what works and what doesn't, they will improve.
Next up is the obvious post-sale moddable game. The clunky control interface you don't like? They'll send a patch and update it. The boring part that feels like a waste of time? Axed.
After that you'll have strong writing talent, refugees from the failing TV and film models, moving in to create vibrant story lines and complex characters.
From there you'll see dimensions added as optional mods to teach you Chinese or mechanical engineering and once you've completed it you'll find out you've earned college credits.
Perhaps you'll have some enterprising, daring designers rolling something like Tron out, with live-action and virtual components depending on where you are in the game.
There are probably many other, better things that visionaries are dreaming up out there. We've only scratched the surface.
to India. Let Pakistan chew on that prospect, if they think it's cool to harbor our arch enemies and give our secrets away to arch-enemies in the making.
And before some Poindexter points out, "but but but most of the supplies for our forces in Afghanistan pass through Pakistan!" I'll say it's high time to pull our forces out of that godforsaken place. We got bin Laden. The Taliban are reduced to one among many warlord factions. The status quo ante has been achieved. Miller time.
I hire experienced coders who know what I'm talking about and what I want. They are twice as expensive as the kids who are fresh out of college, but they are many more times as productive because they don't make the mistakes kids will make. An experienced programmer is worth his weight in platinum.
But I will add one caveat: if I detect rote thinking, a world-weary mien, or an inflexible attitude it instantly disqualifies a candidate. Ornery is fine, even good. But inflexible? Nah, that knocks 'em right out of the running. Why would I want to hire someone who cranked out the same piece of code for their corporate master for 20 years and who's going to be constantly snorting and pshawing every time I try to push the envelope?
So I'd say, learn the new language, pick up some nontraditional platforms like a smartphone or tablet, start hacking, and rekindle your excitement about technology. Be ready to haul out an iPad that you hacked during an interview and beam with your love of doing cool things with tech. Instant hire.
If you don't want to do that, probably better to stay in Project Management.
Is already upon us. Ever try to walk down 34th street in Manhattan while everyone else going the other way is engrossed in their smartphones? They're not trying to eat your brain but they're equally brain-dead, lumbering, and clumsy.
I can only imagine what it's going to be like when augmented reality hits the mainstream.
As a huge tech booster, participant, and builder, I gotta say there's a time and a place, people, a time and a place. If you're running into things or walking out into the middle of Broadway against the light because you can't bear to pause Angry Birds, it means that is neither the time nor the place.
Yes, much of the government's behavior of late is very reminiscent of British Tyranny in the colonial era. I seem to recall there was a very sharp, distinct response to it from Americans then. I wonder what the response will be now?
When you go to a Maker Faire or read Make Magazine or even read/. you can tell the urge to create and innovate are not yet entirely gone from this country. It is on life support, but it's still there. We have about 10 years before it really will be too late, though. We need to take certain steps now to make America a cradle of innovation again.
Government and Big Business have put a massive stranglehold on American innovation. Regulations aren't bad by themselves; they were introduced to counter the abuses of the Trusts (Read: Monopolies) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But now they've been twisted to prefer Big Business and those who can afford the armies of lawyers to interpret and apply them.
Even worse than regulation, though, is the utter lack of capital to invest in start-ups and small businesses. Every bit of wealth that isn't locked down and most of what was supposed to be locked down have been ripped away and given to the big banks and ultra-wealthy to squirrel away in their offshore accounts. Unless you are one of the 0.000000000001% who is connected to those ultra-wealthy, it is impossible to access any of that capital.
So unless you can spin a revenue-making venture out of thin air with no seed capital whatsoever, it doesn't matter how useful or amazing your innovation might be because you will never be able to bring it to market.
Perhaps it would be possible to figure out to spin revenue making ventures out of thin air, but I sure haven't been able to find any place that can teach you. All that exists are people who will help you write a business plan (for a small fee), which is not remotely the same thing--angel investors and venture capitalists will only invest in a business that is already generating revenue, thus neatly clipping any clever venture in the bud.
These have gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I believe the right balance between entertainment and education can still be found. Kids will play video games 24 hours straight if you let them, because they become so absorbed. When they're on a console, the house could catch on fire and they wouldn't notice.
The risk/reward mechanic of modern video games produces a neurochemical response that can be quite addictive.
So if you can insinuate education into that experience such that at the end of completing a mission or game they suddenly speak a new language or have a solid grasp of organic chemistry, then you'll permanently solve all of our problems with the educational system.
modded above 3 thinks this is outrageous. The USA is done.
If they line up the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, AIG, JP Morgan and all the rest of the usual suspects and summarily executed them, and then repossessed all their yachts and limos and burned their mansions to the ground, then personally I'd feel quite a bit better about $16 trillion of our fucking money being handed over to these creeps.
And spare me the "it's just a loan" crap. "Just a loan" that never gets paid back.
I completely agree with this sentiment. We have only begun to scratch the surface of gaming's potential. FPS's, RTS's, Sports Sims, and puzzle games were fine in the first generation of video games, but they've grown quite stale by now.
There are, however, glimmers of something greater out there. We all know Half Life and Shadow of the Colossus. There was also Black & White. I'm sure Slashdotters will jump in with half a dozen more. And recently I played Enslaved, which is one of the best games I've ever seen--bracing, beautiful, moving, and... fun; it had real character development, humor, rage, and all the dramatic elements that draw you into a good film. So as an expressive medium games are just getting started.
But there are also the ventures in serious games that are still trying to strike the right balance between learning and entertainment. I don't doubt we eventually will, because the learning that happens when you're completely absorbed by something leaves every other kind of instruction in the dust.
Put those two things together and you'll have an expressive medium that will leave all others in the dust.
O'Reilly's didn't exist at the time. Remember that this was in the very, very early days of the Web. At the time Mosaic was a recent memory and the Netscape/Internet Explorer war was just beginning. AOL and CompuServe were battling to dominate the Internet as gatekeepers, and everyone laughed when Bill Gates announced that MS would defeat them. So saying, "Well why didn't you just Google it?" is a silly statement when the leading search engine at the time was Infoseek. Google didn't exist. Saying, "buy the used copy on Amazon.com" is a silly thing to say because Amazon.com didn't exist. None of those things did. There was a serious dearth of information on coding and what there was you had to pay dearly for. I couldn't pay that kind of money then, so for me to be able to read the books at Borders was a god-send. It's not too much of a stretch to say that being able to educate myself at one of their stores saved my life. So while I realize the world and business models have moved on, I am grateful Borders was there when I needed them.
That works if you live next to your university library. I no longer did, then, and couldn't have gotten in if I had since they check IDs at the door. The same is true of the other university libraries in that area. I did pretend to be a business school student to sneak into the downtown campus of the business school to use their computers, but they didn't have books on VB there either.
You underestimate the difficulty of getting by when you don't "belong," and at that time I didn't "belong" and had no resources to compensate for lack of affiliation. Borders was a real resource for me, and I'm glad they were there. That's all I'm saying.
Google didn't exist then. And I was so poor that the choice was spend $50 on a book at Borders, or buy groceries. I chose food. I have spent a lot of money at Borders since then, but at that time I couldn't. I am grateful they were there when I needed that resource. That's all I'm saying.
After I got out of grad school in the early nineties I discovered that having an advanced degree from one of the top 5 universities in the country didn't count for squat. After 18 months' fruitless search I got a job at a hedge fund fiduciary. 8 awful months later the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management blew up and nearly took the US economy with it then & there. People invested in hedge funds freaked, pulled out all their money, and I was without a job again.
I got a temp job in Northern Trust Bank's Private Banking division working up investment plans for rich people. The Private Banking division used Excel, of course. It was slow, and repetitious.
So I spent evenings and weekends sitting in Borders taking notes from their books on Visual Basic and VBA in order to automate the process. I couldn't afford to buy the books, I was so poor, and the library only carried books on Fortran and Basic and COBOL. I taught myself how to program that way (yes, I know it was only Visual Basic), and wound up reducing the turnaround time of the Private Banking division from 2 wks to an hour and a half. The division manager promptly fired me and stole my work, but I had found a new window of opportunity. I did more VB work, then added MS Access, then transitioned to VBScript during the dotcom days.
I switched to LAMPP in 1998 and haven't looked back. But it was those days & nights in Borders that allowed me to chart a course for a relatively stable career, given the turbulence of IT and Internet over the past decade. I dunno if their business model has any future, but for me then it was the right place at the right time.
Slashdot Mirror
I gave Unity a fair try--4 weeks. It killed my performance. I could never find my scrollbars, and the hideaway menus were extremely annoying. Honestly, the reason I don't have an Apple system is because I. Cannot. Stand. Apple's. Interface. When I use my computer I want to be productive, not masturbate to beautiful icons.
I have been a big Ubuntu fan for a long time, but if they want to force me to use the crap called Unity, then I'm gone.
and they'll do anything they can to try to stuff the genie back in the bottle, including abrogating our most cherished Constitutional rights. Everyone knows now, with no hearsay or he said, she said, how incompetent and compromised the American government is. You can't go back from there without at least a massive wave of reform. But Obama, the current Congress, and the SCOTUS have no interest in that whatsoever.
We are past the event horizon of a second American Revolution. The question is exactly how long and what form it will take.
And that's what I told my friend who is head of programming at Starz: People want to have a reasonably priced streaming service that lets them watch what they want, when they want. So if you guys on the content side keep putting the screws to Netflix then both of you will lose because people will conclude Torrents are the only way to go.
And if they're thinking that they're going to "crack down on filesharing" to prevent that then they are smoking unhealthy amounts of crack, because I have friends and acquaintances who regularly offer me thumbs and external hard drives with ungodly amounts of media on them. Go ahead, *IAA, try to sniff those packets.
Think you deal with multi-variate systems? Compared to social scientists, no you don't. Think it's devilishly difficult designing a testable environment from which you can draw falsifiable conclusions? Try doing that with test subjects that have a will of their own, that you're also not allowed to dissect and examine afterward, nor abuse during the experiment (through oxygen deprivation, freezing, etc).
Social scientists use the same tools "real" scientists use, that is, math, statistics, computers, and other equipment, and they use them with equal skill and rigor. The difference is "real" scientists can blow things up, kill numberless lower life forms, disassemble systems, hold arbitrary things constant, and employ many, many other tricks that social scientists are unable or not permitted to use. Heck, even the Milgram guy shocked people with his experiments even though what he did was only playing head games with his subjects.
So the next time you're in your lab blending up a bunch of fruit flies to extract their DNA and looking down your nose at the "soft" scientists who "play" at doing experiments, consider how easy it would be to do science with both hands and feet tied behind your back while blindfolded.
Amen! I have also considered trains for domestic travel or boats for international, if first traveling to Canada to fly isn't feasible. The only way I will ever fly in this country again is if
A) the government is overthrown and freedom is restored
B) I get obscenely rich and build my own luxury dirigible/sky yacht
Like a guy who has no life, no family, and no clue. If you do have a life and a family then you're doubly damned because you ought to have a clue.
First, the programmers you get overseas aren't worth the penny you spend on them. I have managed many projects with overseas coding teams and they're all nightmares. They don't speak the language. They don't share your culture. They don't share your timezone. They don't understand professional standards. The ink isn't dry on their software certificates and it won't dry before they've jumped to another outsourcing company, so any time you spend building up effective communication is wasted.
Second, relocation sounds easy to a college kid who spent a semester abroad in Spain, drinking and picking up girls. It's rather less simple when you're a bona fide adult trying to take a job away from a local. The bureaucratic red tape you have to hack through to even get a work visa is insane. And that's for countries that like us. So speaking the language and having spent 2 weeks at Club Med: Bali does not for an easy transition make.
Third, got a wife and kids? Got brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, friends you like? Dropping them like a rock to chase an outsourced job overseas is not going to make you popular in your domicile.
Or maybe you're an MBA who thinks he's immune to being hoisted on his own petard. Well, huh, you've got a shock coming to you in the near future, my friend. Remember all those Indian, Chinese, Latino, etc. folks you drank beers with while skipping Corporate Finance 101? They're positioning themselves to get your job outsourced to them in Bangalore where they can live like kings. I have seen the wave of stuff like this happening in New York, and it fills me with a gentle, happy glow.
No one can hear you scream, and Domino's pizza has no taste.
Oh, wait, the second part's true on Earth, too.
That's a bit harsh about Slashdot--it still has a more educated and informed audience than the average bear and does a fairly decent job of bubbling up informative posts. I've been visiting the site since it started (though I lost my first UID and belatedly registered another before I realized how many cool points I was burning as UID's incremented ever higher) and the general quality has not changed that much. Though I never minded him that much, some would argue Slashdot's quality is even higher now than it was when Jon Katz was around.
That said, I do rather share your frustration with the bleating pussies that seem to populate our country in ever greater numbers. Watching my neighbors in New York shit themselves over a 16mph wind and slight mist last weekend convinced me our country is galloping toward a precipice.
Bring back the daring dreamers, I say. I want my kids to play with chemistry sets that could burn or poison them if they do it wrong. I want them coming back in the house at the end of the day dirty, with scrapes, tired, with giant grins on their faces.
If we wrap everyone and everything in bubblewrap they'll never take risks, and if they never take risks they'll never learn and never do marvelous things.
I saw a feature on Discovery Channel a while back about solar-powered CO2 extractors. It makes me wonder if you could spin that into carbon fibers directly and produce vacuum formed or injection molded composites for a wide variety of applications.
Carbon is such a versatile element that it would be fantastic to mine it from the air and bend it to whatever use you have while lowering atmospheric CO2 levels; kills two birds with one stone.
I am young, but I have an implanted defibrillator. Looking at me, you wouldn't know it. So I wonder if that's a point of demarcation between what we consider a cyborg and what we don't. With a prosthetic arm you know you're augmented, and everyone else does too. They treat you differently, you see yourself differently. But it's conceivable you could be far more augmented than a person with a replacement arm and never think about that fact. Does that make you more or less human, more or less cyborg, if the social dimension of your augmentation is different?
in the last 10 years. The hysteria that the "News" is whipping up is much more dangerous than a little wind and rain.
We live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that is higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty, and yet the mouth-breathers were still panicking and fighting over bottled water in the supermarket. Can Fox News, CNN, and the others be held criminally liable for inciting to riot, because that's exactly what they're doing.
Here's a thought: one of the feared aspects of a hurricane is lots of rain, which conveniently means if you want fresh water you can put a pot out your window and catch yourself some. And as far as food goes, most Americans are so fat they could live on their paunches for at least a month before they need to eat again.
In short, it's. Going. To. Be. OK. Really.
Atari still exists?
of entertainment. That's right. We're at the dawn of the age when real artistry will express itself through games. Some titles have already shown the potential (Half Life, Enslaved, Shadow of the Colossus, etc). But as players and designers learn what works and what doesn't, they will improve.
Next up is the obvious post-sale moddable game. The clunky control interface you don't like? They'll send a patch and update it. The boring part that feels like a waste of time? Axed.
After that you'll have strong writing talent, refugees from the failing TV and film models, moving in to create vibrant story lines and complex characters.
From there you'll see dimensions added as optional mods to teach you Chinese or mechanical engineering and once you've completed it you'll find out you've earned college credits.
Perhaps you'll have some enterprising, daring designers rolling something like Tron out, with live-action and virtual components depending on where you are in the game.
There are probably many other, better things that visionaries are dreaming up out there. We've only scratched the surface.
to India. Let Pakistan chew on that prospect, if they think it's cool to harbor our arch enemies and give our secrets away to arch-enemies in the making.
And before some Poindexter points out, "but but but most of the supplies for our forces in Afghanistan pass through Pakistan!" I'll say it's high time to pull our forces out of that godforsaken place. We got bin Laden. The Taliban are reduced to one among many warlord factions. The status quo ante has been achieved. Miller time.
I hire experienced coders who know what I'm talking about and what I want. They are twice as expensive as the kids who are fresh out of college, but they are many more times as productive because they don't make the mistakes kids will make. An experienced programmer is worth his weight in platinum.
But I will add one caveat: if I detect rote thinking, a world-weary mien, or an inflexible attitude it instantly disqualifies a candidate. Ornery is fine, even good. But inflexible? Nah, that knocks 'em right out of the running. Why would I want to hire someone who cranked out the same piece of code for their corporate master for 20 years and who's going to be constantly snorting and pshawing every time I try to push the envelope?
So I'd say, learn the new language, pick up some nontraditional platforms like a smartphone or tablet, start hacking, and rekindle your excitement about technology. Be ready to haul out an iPad that you hacked during an interview and beam with your love of doing cool things with tech. Instant hire.
If you don't want to do that, probably better to stay in Project Management.
Is already upon us. Ever try to walk down 34th street in Manhattan while everyone else going the other way is engrossed in their smartphones? They're not trying to eat your brain but they're equally brain-dead, lumbering, and clumsy.
I can only imagine what it's going to be like when augmented reality hits the mainstream.
As a huge tech booster, participant, and builder, I gotta say there's a time and a place, people, a time and a place. If you're running into things or walking out into the middle of Broadway against the light because you can't bear to pause Angry Birds, it means that is neither the time nor the place.
in the colonial era.'
Yes, much of the government's behavior of late is very reminiscent of British Tyranny in the colonial era. I seem to recall there was a very sharp, distinct response to it from Americans then. I wonder what the response will be now?
Sic semper tyrannis...
When you go to a Maker Faire or read Make Magazine or even read /. you can tell the urge to create and innovate are not yet entirely gone from this country. It is on life support, but it's still there. We have about 10 years before it really will be too late, though. We need to take certain steps now to make America a cradle of innovation again.
Government and Big Business have put a massive stranglehold on American innovation. Regulations aren't bad by themselves; they were introduced to counter the abuses of the Trusts (Read: Monopolies) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But now they've been twisted to prefer Big Business and those who can afford the armies of lawyers to interpret and apply them.
Even worse than regulation, though, is the utter lack of capital to invest in start-ups and small businesses. Every bit of wealth that isn't locked down and most of what was supposed to be locked down have been ripped away and given to the big banks and ultra-wealthy to squirrel away in their offshore accounts. Unless you are one of the 0.000000000001% who is connected to those ultra-wealthy, it is impossible to access any of that capital.
So unless you can spin a revenue-making venture out of thin air with no seed capital whatsoever, it doesn't matter how useful or amazing your innovation might be because you will never be able to bring it to market.
Perhaps it would be possible to figure out to spin revenue making ventures out of thin air, but I sure haven't been able to find any place that can teach you. All that exists are people who will help you write a business plan (for a small fee), which is not remotely the same thing--angel investors and venture capitalists will only invest in a business that is already generating revenue, thus neatly clipping any clever venture in the bud.
These have gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I believe the right balance between entertainment and education can still be found. Kids will play video games 24 hours straight if you let them, because they become so absorbed. When they're on a console, the house could catch on fire and they wouldn't notice.
The risk/reward mechanic of modern video games produces a neurochemical response that can be quite addictive.
So if you can insinuate education into that experience such that at the end of completing a mission or game they suddenly speak a new language or have a solid grasp of organic chemistry, then you'll permanently solve all of our problems with the educational system.
modded above 3 thinks this is outrageous. The USA is done.
If they line up the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, AIG, JP Morgan and all the rest of the usual suspects and summarily executed them, and then repossessed all their yachts and limos and burned their mansions to the ground, then personally I'd feel quite a bit better about $16 trillion of our fucking money being handed over to these creeps.
And spare me the "it's just a loan" crap. "Just a loan" that never gets paid back.
I completely agree with this sentiment. We have only begun to scratch the surface of gaming's potential. FPS's, RTS's, Sports Sims, and puzzle games were fine in the first generation of video games, but they've grown quite stale by now.
There are, however, glimmers of something greater out there. We all know Half Life and Shadow of the Colossus. There was also Black & White. I'm sure Slashdotters will jump in with half a dozen more. And recently I played Enslaved, which is one of the best games I've ever seen--bracing, beautiful, moving, and ... fun; it had real character development, humor, rage, and all the dramatic elements that draw you into a good film. So as an expressive medium games are just getting started.
But there are also the ventures in serious games that are still trying to strike the right balance between learning and entertainment. I don't doubt we eventually will, because the learning that happens when you're completely absorbed by something leaves every other kind of instruction in the dust.
Put those two things together and you'll have an expressive medium that will leave all others in the dust.
I only hope I live to see it.
O'Reilly's didn't exist at the time. Remember that this was in the very, very early days of the Web. At the time Mosaic was a recent memory and the Netscape/Internet Explorer war was just beginning. AOL and CompuServe were battling to dominate the Internet as gatekeepers, and everyone laughed when Bill Gates announced that MS would defeat them. So saying, "Well why didn't you just Google it?" is a silly statement when the leading search engine at the time was Infoseek. Google didn't exist. Saying, "buy the used copy on Amazon.com" is a silly thing to say because Amazon.com didn't exist. None of those things did. There was a serious dearth of information on coding and what there was you had to pay dearly for. I couldn't pay that kind of money then, so for me to be able to read the books at Borders was a god-send. It's not too much of a stretch to say that being able to educate myself at one of their stores saved my life. So while I realize the world and business models have moved on, I am grateful Borders was there when I needed them.
That works if you live next to your university library. I no longer did, then, and couldn't have gotten in if I had since they check IDs at the door. The same is true of the other university libraries in that area. I did pretend to be a business school student to sneak into the downtown campus of the business school to use their computers, but they didn't have books on VB there either.
You underestimate the difficulty of getting by when you don't "belong," and at that time I didn't "belong" and had no resources to compensate for lack of affiliation. Borders was a real resource for me, and I'm glad they were there. That's all I'm saying.
Google didn't exist then. And I was so poor that the choice was spend $50 on a book at Borders, or buy groceries. I chose food. I have spent a lot of money at Borders since then, but at that time I couldn't. I am grateful they were there when I needed that resource. That's all I'm saying.
After I got out of grad school in the early nineties I discovered that having an advanced degree from one of the top 5 universities in the country didn't count for squat. After 18 months' fruitless search I got a job at a hedge fund fiduciary. 8 awful months later the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management blew up and nearly took the US economy with it then & there. People invested in hedge funds freaked, pulled out all their money, and I was without a job again.
I got a temp job in Northern Trust Bank's Private Banking division working up investment plans for rich people. The Private Banking division used Excel, of course. It was slow, and repetitious.
So I spent evenings and weekends sitting in Borders taking notes from their books on Visual Basic and VBA in order to automate the process. I couldn't afford to buy the books, I was so poor, and the library only carried books on Fortran and Basic and COBOL. I taught myself how to program that way (yes, I know it was only Visual Basic), and wound up reducing the turnaround time of the Private Banking division from 2 wks to an hour and a half. The division manager promptly fired me and stole my work, but I had found a new window of opportunity. I did more VB work, then added MS Access, then transitioned to VBScript during the dotcom days.
I switched to LAMPP in 1998 and haven't looked back. But it was those days & nights in Borders that allowed me to chart a course for a relatively stable career, given the turbulence of IT and Internet over the past decade. I dunno if their business model has any future, but for me then it was the right place at the right time.
RIP Borders