It'll always be a bit more expensive, less extra cost than now maybe once it gets more common/commoditized/whatever, but fundamentally....
gamers are older now than they used to be, especially those with cash to spend on high end stuff.
Its probably a bit of an over-generalisation/stereotype, but with increasing age comes increasing likelihood of there being other responsibilities in life. So something as immersive as VR becomes quite difficult to actually participate in.
I.e. in VR I can't...
- hear the doorbell - see when the dog/cat wants to go out / get fed - see when the wife/spouse/etc wants attention - see when the babies/children wake - have a conversation with anyone else in the room. - see when you get a message/notification/etc from friends
It's basically *too* immersive to be an accessible form of entertainment for a large percentage of the population.
Plus the need for a decent amount of space, and evenly balanced eyesight, and reasonable aversion to nausea/motion-sickness.
Frankly I used to love sim racing (iRacing, primarily). But that pretty much stopped being a thing when we got a dog. If the damn animal wanted to go out and barked/scratched/etc that was race over......so I ended up just not bothering.
Now with small children + dogs + wife. VR... no way.
I bought one yes, a Vive soon after original release. And it is awesome. Do I ever play it? Ever? No. Weirdly only when hosting parties/etc and only then as an entertainment/novelty piece.
So no, I never thought it would be mainstream......because mainstream people can't frequently disconnect from RL for any real period of time to engage in VR experiences.
And, despite what I opened this post with, I don't think it will *ever* be mainstream for entertainment/gaming for exactly this reason, no matter how much costs come down.
(one could argue there are multiple reasons for the dumbing down of games; one reason being the common case complaint of a simple society. The other being that there are just too many time/attention pressures on the average gamer that a larger percentage just don't have the time or mental space to fully commit in the way that a zero-responsibility-teenager can).
The regional difference is interesting - here in sunny england i have been using this service for some months. Prices are comparable to local stores, and often cheaper...
With the added advanfage of not having to leave the house, pay petrol, etc......amazon delivery ftw!
I evaluated a few, not for very long admittedly, but found all of them to be too slow.
Fundamentally, doing this stuff professionally means your workstation and tooling (ide or editor or whatever) needs to be an extension of you for you to be able to function efficiently and keep a good flow going. Some of this is muscle memory on keyboard layout and shortcuts, most of it (imo) is responsiveness and ui latency. If the ui cant respond faster than you notice it then it just hurts too much to create stuff effectively.
Hence, for me at least, native ide is important. Even if it syncs to a remote host on save for compile/preview/run (so long as it consistently does that quicker than i can alt+tab).
I love that integrated environments are available online, and i love the portability of that. But i just dont think it can be fast enough for serious development.
(Nb, by fast although ive not really done any benchmarking, the bottleneck so far as i can tell is the ide in javascript locally, even on a decent pc, rather than network latency)
What fraud? The car performed as advertised, right?
Actually it didn't. Emissions are part of advertised specs. In the UK at least, this is an important figure because it determines how much annual road tax you have to pay to drive the thing - i.e. its important to consumers making the decision....and its really important to the UK government who have arguably been defrauded out of a whole bunch of tax revenue.
As an employer yourself, would you be willing to sign-off on that if that meant you might eventually lose him as a result? Actually, don't answer that. Even if you agree to that, because you're a reasonable manager, a better question would be, do you think your HR department and legal in-house counsel (assuming your company is big enough to have those) would agree to something like that with an existing employee (when unlike you, they don't have a relationship with the employee in question, they probably don't even know him all that well, except for the fact that he's probably a valuable employee and that it may cost the company money down the road if they were to agree to such an exclusion)??
I'll be frank - but these are my opinions only.
Yes I would employ them with those caveats in place (and yes signoff can be sought from the other depts involved) - but I do see that as the employee saying "I'll work for you, but only until something else comes along" and to be honest that is a negative. If an employee is borderline at the hiring stage, this would not count in their favour for being hired.
We want people to be committed to us and for us to be their career, for as long as they choose to remain with us. The perception this gives is that they can/will leave at any time, and while they are with us they won't put in the effort to make it work anyway because they'll also be focusing on their home projects. Some people can make this work, keep the two separate and still give 100% in the day job. Many can't.
probably a valuable employee
This is the key bit. On hiring them it is very "probably". Taking on someone new is a risk for the employer as much as it is a big step for the employee, especially for small business.
The honesty of being clear that they want to do side projects is appreciated (and important!), but to be frank it is a negative. Sorry.
You may also be right that many employers probably wouldn't...I can only speak from my experience.
They aren't intended to own your soul. I believe (again IANAL) they are intended to start from a position of legal clarity regarding the ownership of software produced by the employee that *may* make its way into company software products.
Obviously the company has to be clear that it does actually own what it thinks it owns (including its software). The clause prevents cases where the employee may write a nifty library at home, and use it at work as well, before subsequently deciding to sell it to someone else and denying the employer any legal right to use it - or even the choice of whether to use the '3rd party' code.
I agree there should be processes and people in place to avoid this happening in the first place (not least of which is a code signoff process) - but the 'default' position, as reflected by the contract, is for legal clarity. A reasonable employer should be able to exclude you from it, on the proviso that there are clear ownership rules around what employees write in their own time (plus no-compete rules).
I would like to reiterate; these clauses are - at least as far as my organisation is concerned - NOT about "we own your soul". Any reasonable employer should be able to come to a mutually agreeable agreement with you if you TALK to them. If they won't....well they probably aren't people you want to work for anyway...
There are legal advice services for employees too. Sometimes they are even available through the employer (provided by a 3rd party so unbiased). We do this through RBS mentor services. (I don't have a link sorry and cba to google for you;)
hehe, if you feel like that then you will find employers won't care about you...
but fwiw you're wrong. A great many employers care hugely for the welfare, wellbeing, personal development, skills development and happiness of their employess. But you won't find one to work for while you have that attitude.
As a general rule, this is mostly unenforceable and/or is trivially worked around.
That may be, but life is a lot simpler for everyone if we can all work by mutual prior agreement.
*all* contracts start in the favour of the people who wrote them. It's a game to make it mutually fair as much as it is to do a decent tax return or haggle for goods at the market. You may not like that it's a game (I don't!), but it is one.
Yes - explain why you don't like this, and what you intend to do in your spare time that you wish to retain ownership of.
These clauses usually come from a desire that employees don't misappropriate company IP and use it to write something competing. Or for a competitor (where the 'who owns what' question becomes murkier).
Any reasonable employer will write you an exclusion, but likely with a no-compete clause, which is fair enough.
IANAL, but I write the above as an employer, running a tech team of 21.
Some policies are lame yes, and some in charge of them are stupid, but for the most part these 'enemies' are just trying to protect the bigger picture.
Probably the biggest part of this is security. All the things quoted in TFA are a nightmare to ensure are secure, and to support!
For what its worth, as an employer I'm equally put off by candidates who list a massive long list of things they are "expert" in. Nobody can be expert in all those things.
Especially "equivalent" technologies like PHP / Java / VB.net / ASP (yes I know they are different - but nobody can actually be expert in all of them!)
Edit: transferrable skills are important, and understanding the underlying principles is important and leads to it being much easier to learn other platforms/languages. Nevertheless they all have their own idiosyncracies and 'right' ways of doing things.
Southampton was #2 for CS in the late 90s when I was there. I understand its still good - but perhaps more so for Computer Engineering / Microelectronics than CS.
The course itself means little (in any discipline I'm sure, let alone one as broad as CS). You have to demonstrate that you care and love the subject, and therefore understand it far more intimately than any course can teach.
Actually its not quite as straightforward as that....to have staff in India counts as having a commercial presence in India. That renders you liable to Corporation tax in India, as well as in the UK.
Ofc there are ways people get around that by having *contractors* in India through umbrella agencies, or by straight outsourcing, but its not quite as simple as "get the Indians in".
I don't necessarily have the best view of the overall market, but as an employer my view is different here...
I feel more people are taking CS, since it's become more mainstream. Having a CS degree, however, doesn't make you a good developer or a good techie. Employers want good people, nee great people!
There are many people who have a degree (even a masters!) and just aren't that good.
What I would say, is that the degree should teach principles; an underlying approach and a way to think. However, peoples' ability to absorb that part is - IMO - not necessarily reflected in their final grade.
For me, demonstration of practical experience (whether done commercially, at home for fun or part of a course) is far more valuable in ascertaining someone's skill set.
As an employer, of a tech team of nearly 20 who's actually hiring now as well I would very much like to agree with AmiMojo.
The single biggest contributor to whether we will hire someone or not is whether we are convinced that they are actually really good.
Qualifications and degrees to NOT say that. Having a shiny last job does not say that.
What says it is two things; - code we can see that is good, whether from our aptitude test or code that you wrote and can show us (legally, without breaking NDAs) - an obvious love for the subject, enough to do it in your spare time at home (not work, just tech things)
Personally I don't care whether a candidate has a degree or not. I care that they know what they are talking about, have good problem-solving skills, can communicate to some degree, and that they have a can-do attitude.
I don't know what unemployment is like in my region (Hampshire), but I do know there's lots of candidates...just most aren't particularly good.
A much better way to implement this unnecessary cookie law would be to put the responsibility on browser vendors instead of website owners.
This. I was wondering why nobody else was making this point.
It could even be accompanied by a law mandating that cookies are associated with descriptive information about what they are for.
A browser-based implementation would be impossible for sites to not comply with, more user friendly for the masses, better for sites, and better for privacy.
I really don't understand why the onus has been placed on sites:(
They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
Not sure I'm completely understanding your point - but "using Steam in games" can be a whole lot more than just as a distribution channel.
Steamworks integration provides copy protection, social networking, cloud storage of settings/savegames, achievements, leaderboards, etc, etc, etc.
I for one (and I know I'm shallow) pretty much only buy games with Steamworks or GFWL integration (unless they are truly excellent).
Oh, and for PC, I can't even remember the last time I bought a physical disk/box. My PC is even arranged now so I can't even get to the DVD drive......hate them...
Maybe this is what you meant, but I just think this is the perfect example to illustrate to all how biometrics are just NOT the be-all and end-all. If only for the one simple fact that he cannot change his fingerprint like he could a password that got compromised!
hmm, I find this as scary as the next guy - but isn't there a part of every geek that finds its fascinating?
Its like the holy grail of data analysis; transcending the bording bits of storage and indexing to the complex fun bits of trying to organise data and explore interfaces for making easy for humans to tag related 'facts' and associate them with others.
Not a fan of big brother - but I've love to be writing the tech that does it!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto - but again for a different reason.
It'll always be a bit more expensive, less extra cost than now maybe once it gets more common/commoditized/whatever, but fundamentally....
gamers are older now than they used to be, especially those with cash to spend on high end stuff.
Its probably a bit of an over-generalisation/stereotype, but with increasing age comes increasing likelihood of there being other responsibilities in life. So something as immersive as VR becomes quite difficult to actually participate in.
I.e. in VR I can't...
- hear the doorbell
- see when the dog/cat wants to go out / get fed
- see when the wife/spouse/etc wants attention
- see when the babies/children wake
- have a conversation with anyone else in the room.
- see when you get a message/notification/etc from friends
It's basically *too* immersive to be an accessible form of entertainment for a large percentage of the population.
Plus the need for a decent amount of space, and evenly balanced eyesight, and reasonable aversion to nausea/motion-sickness.
Frankly I used to love sim racing (iRacing, primarily). But that pretty much stopped being a thing when we got a dog. If the damn animal wanted to go out and barked/scratched/etc that was race over... ...so I ended up just not bothering.
Now with small children + dogs + wife. VR... no way.
I bought one yes, a Vive soon after original release. And it is awesome. Do I ever play it? Ever? No. Weirdly only when hosting parties/etc and only then as an entertainment/novelty piece.
So no, I never thought it would be mainstream... ...because mainstream people can't frequently disconnect from RL for any real period of time to engage in VR experiences.
And, despite what I opened this post with, I don't think it will *ever* be mainstream for entertainment/gaming for exactly this reason, no matter how much costs come down.
(one could argue there are multiple reasons for the dumbing down of games; one reason being the common case complaint of a simple society. The other being that there are just too many time/attention pressures on the average gamer that a larger percentage just don't have the time or mental space to fully commit in the way that a zero-responsibility-teenager can).
The regional difference is interesting - here in sunny england i have been using this service for some months. Prices are comparable to local stores, and often cheaper...
With the added advanfage of not having to leave the house, pay petrol, etc... ...amazon delivery ftw!
Actually with young children at home meaning it is hard to leave the house once they have gone to bed this is fantastically useful....
Ofc small children also mean much less headspace for being organised for your own pleasures. And well sometimes randomly lets just have wine!
I evaluated a few, not for very long admittedly, but found all of them to be too slow.
Fundamentally, doing this stuff professionally means your workstation and tooling (ide or editor or whatever) needs to be an extension of you for you to be able to function efficiently and keep a good flow going. Some of this is muscle memory on keyboard layout and shortcuts, most of it (imo) is responsiveness and ui latency. If the ui cant respond faster than you notice it then it just hurts too much to create stuff effectively.
Hence, for me at least, native ide is important. Even if it syncs to a remote host on save for compile/preview/run (so long as it consistently does that quicker than i can alt+tab).
I love that integrated environments are available online, and i love the portability of that. But i just dont think it can be fast enough for serious development.
(Nb, by fast although ive not really done any benchmarking, the bottleneck so far as i can tell is the ide in javascript locally, even on a decent pc, rather than network latency)
What fraud? The car performed as advertised, right?
Actually it didn't. Emissions are part of advertised specs. In the UK at least, this is an important figure because it determines how much annual road tax you have to pay to drive the thing - i.e. its important to consumers making the decision....and its really important to the UK government who have arguably been defrauded out of a whole bunch of tax revenue.
teehee, you put this so much better than I just did ;)
As an employer yourself, would you be willing to sign-off on that if that meant you might eventually lose him as a result? Actually, don't answer that. Even if you agree to that, because you're a reasonable manager, a better question would be, do you think your HR department and legal in-house counsel (assuming your company is big enough to have those) would agree to something like that with an existing employee (when unlike you, they don't have a relationship with the employee in question, they probably don't even know him all that well, except for the fact that he's probably a valuable employee and that it may cost the company money down the road if they were to agree to such an exclusion)??
I'll be frank - but these are my opinions only.
Yes I would employ them with those caveats in place (and yes signoff can be sought from the other depts involved) - but I do see that as the employee saying "I'll work for you, but only until something else comes along" and to be honest that is a negative. If an employee is borderline at the hiring stage, this would not count in their favour for being hired.
We want people to be committed to us and for us to be their career, for as long as they choose to remain with us. The perception this gives is that they can/will leave at any time, and while they are with us they won't put in the effort to make it work anyway because they'll also be focusing on their home projects. Some people can make this work, keep the two separate and still give 100% in the day job. Many can't.
probably a valuable employee
This is the key bit. On hiring them it is very "probably". Taking on someone new is a risk for the employer as much as it is a big step for the employee, especially for small business.
The honesty of being clear that they want to do side projects is appreciated (and important!), but to be frank it is a negative. Sorry.
You may also be right that many employers probably wouldn't...I can only speak from my experience.
They aren't intended to own your soul. I believe (again IANAL) they are intended to start from a position of legal clarity regarding the ownership of software produced by the employee that *may* make its way into company software products.
Obviously the company has to be clear that it does actually own what it thinks it owns (including its software). The clause prevents cases where the employee may write a nifty library at home, and use it at work as well, before subsequently deciding to sell it to someone else and denying the employer any legal right to use it - or even the choice of whether to use the '3rd party' code.
I agree there should be processes and people in place to avoid this happening in the first place (not least of which is a code signoff process) - but the 'default' position, as reflected by the contract, is for legal clarity. A reasonable employer should be able to exclude you from it, on the proviso that there are clear ownership rules around what employees write in their own time (plus no-compete rules).
I would like to reiterate; these clauses are - at least as far as my organisation is concerned - NOT about "we own your soul". Any reasonable employer should be able to come to a mutually agreeable agreement with you if you TALK to them. If they won't....well they probably aren't people you want to work for anyway...
There are legal advice services for employees too. Sometimes they are even available through the employer (provided by a 3rd party so unbiased). We do this through RBS mentor services. (I don't have a link sorry and cba to google for you ;)
hehe, if you feel like that then you will find employers won't care about you...
but fwiw you're wrong. A great many employers care hugely for the welfare, wellbeing, personal development, skills development and happiness of their employess. But you won't find one to work for while you have that attitude.
Oh no, not another "ask a lawyer" question.
As a general rule, this is mostly unenforceable and/or is trivially worked around.
That may be, but life is a lot simpler for everyone if we can all work by mutual prior agreement.
*all* contracts start in the favour of the people who wrote them. It's a game to make it mutually fair as much as it is to do a decent tax return or haggle for goods at the market. You may not like that it's a game (I don't!), but it is one.
Yes - explain why you don't like this, and what you intend to do in your spare time that you wish to retain ownership of.
These clauses usually come from a desire that employees don't misappropriate company IP and use it to write something competing. Or for a competitor (where the 'who owns what' question becomes murkier).
Any reasonable employer will write you an exclusion, but likely with a no-compete clause, which is fair enough.
IANAL, but I write the above as an employer, running a tech team of 21.
Well actually I do a bit, with everyone on Windows 7 games can start to be dx11 only, which means more pretty.
Mostly I just care about people getting off ie6, and that's happening anyway so who cares what OS people use under the browser.
+1
Some policies are lame yes, and some in charge of them are stupid, but for the most part these 'enemies' are just trying to protect the bigger picture.
Probably the biggest part of this is security. All the things quoted in TFA are a nightmare to ensure are secure, and to support!
For what its worth, as an employer I'm equally put off by candidates who list a massive long list of things they are "expert" in. Nobody can be expert in all those things.
Especially "equivalent" technologies like PHP / Java / VB.net / ASP (yes I know they are different - but nobody can actually be expert in all of them!)
Edit: transferrable skills are important, and understanding the underlying principles is important and leads to it being much easier to learn other platforms/languages. Nevertheless they all have their own idiosyncracies and 'right' ways of doing things.
Southampton was #2 for CS in the late 90s when I was there. I understand its still good - but perhaps more so for Computer Engineering / Microelectronics than CS.
This.
both the OP and the GP.
The course itself means little (in any discipline I'm sure, let alone one as broad as CS). You have to demonstrate that you care and love the subject, and therefore understand it far more intimately than any course can teach.
Actually its not quite as straightforward as that....to have staff in India counts as having a commercial presence in India. That renders you liable to Corporation tax in India, as well as in the UK.
Ofc there are ways people get around that by having *contractors* in India through umbrella agencies, or by straight outsourcing, but its not quite as simple as "get the Indians in".
I don't necessarily have the best view of the overall market, but as an employer my view is different here...
I feel more people are taking CS, since it's become more mainstream. Having a CS degree, however, doesn't make you a good developer or a good techie. Employers want good people, nee great people!
There are many people who have a degree (even a masters!) and just aren't that good.
What I would say, is that the degree should teach principles; an underlying approach and a way to think. However, peoples' ability to absorb that part is - IMO - not necessarily reflected in their final grade.
For me, demonstration of practical experience (whether done commercially, at home for fun or part of a course) is far more valuable in ascertaining someone's skill set.
As an employer, of a tech team of nearly 20 who's actually hiring now as well I would very much like to agree with AmiMojo.
The single biggest contributor to whether we will hire someone or not is whether we are convinced that they are actually really good.
Qualifications and degrees to NOT say that. Having a shiny last job does not say that.
What says it is two things;
- code we can see that is good, whether from our aptitude test or code that you wrote and can show us (legally, without breaking NDAs)
- an obvious love for the subject, enough to do it in your spare time at home (not work, just tech things)
Personally I don't care whether a candidate has a degree or not. I care that they know what they are talking about, have good problem-solving skills, can communicate to some degree, and that they have a can-do attitude.
I don't know what unemployment is like in my region (Hampshire), but I do know there's lots of candidates...just most aren't particularly good.
A much better way to implement this unnecessary cookie law would be to put the responsibility on browser vendors instead of website owners.
This. I was wondering why nobody else was making this point.
It could even be accompanied by a law mandating that cookies are associated with descriptive information about what they are for.
A browser-based implementation would be impossible for sites to not comply with, more user friendly for the masses, better for sites, and better for privacy.
I really don't understand why the onus has been placed on sites :(
They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
Not sure I'm completely understanding your point - but "using Steam in games" can be a whole lot more than just as a distribution channel.
Steamworks integration provides copy protection, social networking, cloud storage of settings/savegames, achievements, leaderboards, etc, etc, etc.
I for one (and I know I'm shallow) pretty much only buy games with Steamworks or GFWL integration (unless they are truly excellent).
Oh, and for PC, I can't even remember the last time I bought a physical disk/box. My PC is even arranged now so I can't even get to the DVD drive......hate them...
Maybe this is what you meant, but I just think this is the perfect example to illustrate to all how biometrics are just NOT the be-all and end-all. If only for the one simple fact that he cannot change his fingerprint like he could a password that got compromised!
hmm, I find this as scary as the next guy - but isn't there a part of every geek that finds its fascinating?
Its like the holy grail of data analysis; transcending the bording bits of storage and indexing to the complex fun bits of trying to organise data and explore interfaces for making easy for humans to tag related 'facts' and associate them with others.
Not a fan of big brother - but I've love to be writing the tech that does it!!!
hehe, that description just says 'sysadmin' to me ;)
I love my sysadmin (hi Rob!), worth his weight in gold!