In the news, the VC++ debugger has come under fire from the RIAA for producing melodic tunes that sound very similar to several copyrighted materials.
"Whoever wrote the code that produced these tunes, we want to find them and bring them to justice." said Hillary Rosen, of the RIAA. "Neither Microsoft, nor the developer in question, has paid royalties to the artists whose songs they have violated. Renegade debuggers must be stopped, for they pose the greatest threat to the artists' intellectual property we've ever seen!"
I wish this kind of event was publicized more (ie, you won't see this on nightly news in the DC area, more than likely). Whenever I talk about DRM, my non-technical friends stare at me blankly or, worse, label me 'one of those extremists' in the computer field. I try to explain that it will affect them in that they won't be able to listen to their own music on their computer, etc, but it usually gets a reply of "That would suck" and then they go on their way.
Nobody that I know outside of/. and the computer/legal professions really seems to be aware of this stuff. How do we make people more aware of the consequences of unopposed government restriction? That's my real question.
Whatever the answer, I wish these groups the best of luck today.
That kind of surveillance would, however, be limited to obtaining a suspect's telephone number, IP address, URLs or e-mail header information--not the contents of online communications or telephone calls.
Okay, I'm thoroughly confused. So you think someone is 'hacking' into a system and may cause 'bodily harm'. You're allowed to find essentially the location of said individual, but you can't snoop the data in the packets, only the packet headers? Does this make sense to anyone else? How can you actually tell what someone is doing without looking at the data they're sending across.
OTOH, is this a loophole? "Sorry, you couldn't possibly have any idea what I was doing on that system unless you were snooping packet data, which is clearly illegal."
<sigh> Bartender, send those folks at the end of the bar a clue, on me...
According to research firm Gartner, the service has about 14 million registered users.
<sigh> I have to wonder if they're including the hotmail users in this number, since signing up for passport and hotmail are linked. If so, this number is hugely overinflated...the number of people actively using passport is way smaller. Too bad, companies may read this and decide it's a great way to reach a large audience.
So I won't be able to play MP3s on my PC any more?
And you can't play burned games in your Playstation, and copy protected games can't be duplicated, and servers that enforce cd-keys can't be worked around...
In the digital world, everything's a signal. You have an input signal and an output signal, and a black (or not so black) box between them. There will ALWAYS be a way around this type of encryption/protection/'feature'. The FUD that spreads on this topic really amazes me.
I liken this to Chris Rock's take on drugs (apologies ahead of time)...
"Even if you got rid of all the drugs...all the smack, all the herb, all the blow, it's not gonna matter. Why? Cause people wanna get high. You'll have guys becoming scientists down in their basement...
'Yo, check this out, check it out. If you take a baby's bottle, fill it with a little gasoline and a lima bean and suck, mista you'll be F'd up!'"
And the same applies to all this DRM crap. Someone will always come out with a workaround. Fifteen minutes after they release this motherboard with a smartchip on it, some guy will have an IC that you can solder over some leads that makes it worthless, or some software that intercepts the signal, changes it, and makes the chip think it's receiving legal information.
My only problem is the fact they're making law abiding citizens become criminals because we HAVE to.
Actually, if we're only talking $3K more on the initial price tag, sign me up...let's do some math.
(Before we begin, I live outside of D.C.)
Current gas price: $1.46/gal Amount spent per week: around $23 Amount spent per year: 52 x $23 = $1196 Amount spent per year (45% better): $657.80 Savings: $538.20
So we're talking around 6 years to recoup your savings just from gas. I intend to have a car for >6 years, so yeah, I would buy this thing. Consider, also, gas prices have steadily gone up over the PAST 6 years, so you're actually talking about saving more than that.
Ummm....no. A decoy file may constitute a forgery and waste your time, but it's not denying a service. You're not stopping someone from being able to download a file or use a service, you're showing decoys that confuse them and waste their time.
Firstly, this is only an issue with music that is obtained illegally. Yeah, make the case of the guy downloading a song that he owns the CD for, but in 90%+ of the cases, this is aimed at illegal downloading. People who put their music out there to download WON'T HAVE DECOYS.
If we're all so concerned about being able to download music we own the rights to, why don't we just publish a list of checksums that would authenticate the songs? Have Kazaa, Limewire, etc then show these checksums. Easy way around decoys.
Look at the hostnames. Our works blocked out oscar.aol.com (I think that's it) and it successfully defeated AIM. I believe that most IMs use domain name lookups, so find the domain name and block that.
Stepping up on a soapbox for a second...IM actually IS a useful tool. We used to use it quite a bit before it got blocked. As a developer, it was more convenient than holding a phone up to my ear, I could respond at liberty when I had actually finished reading through something, and the person on the other side of the phone didn't have to listen to my random grunts, groans, hems and haws. Granted, you're going to have the group of people that abuse it, but I would have to say personally the benefits well outweighed the problems.
Seriously, I consider myself a somewhat more liberal than most Republican, yet I still criticize any part of the government that I see fit...and I haven't had one person accuse me of being anti-American. Searches in airports? God never decried "...and Man shall have unrestricted access to expedient travel". It's a privilege, not a right, that we are given. You don't like how airports are handling the situation? DON'T FLY. Drive, take a train, take a bus, you'll soon see these 'major' delays are nothing more than a slight inconvenience.
I keep seeing people on/. saying "Our rights and liberties are being taken away from us". Please, name one for me...concrete example. Go for it.
By far the most annoying (and probably best) copy protections were for Empire and Bard's Tale III. Empire had you look up words in the manual (120+ pages) and enter the xth word on line y.
Bard's Tale III had a code wheel...with three wheels and around 20 entries per, with cutouts that showed through...truly annoying, but the best part was that they didn't ask you for it until, like, 5 hours into the game, so you could be playing for awhile and then start cursing them.
These CD's aren't about stopping Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa/etc
Actually, yeah, they are. They're just not going to DO that. Someone out there thinks that if they make it harder to put a CD in the computer, it will stop the online file sharing. Apparently that person missed the day they taught "Digital media 101" when they went over that it only takes 1 copy of something in digital form to spawn 10^x copies of it.
They seem to be treating CDs like cars. A car has proprietary pieces that you can't find anywhere and you would need special tools to take it apart and put it back together. If one person did this, no harm...other people WON'T do this and they can't directly benefit from that person's example. Digital media is not like this at all...one person gets a CD to work in their drive, makes a digital copy and suddenly it's like the record companies shouldn't have even bothered.
The concept that cost = worth = money is lost on me, I'm afraid.
I ran a BBS for years, and as almost any other Sysop can attest to, we invested more time in our boards than the majority of people who develop OSS (obvious exceptions, yada yada yada). However, when I think about what this cost me and what my board was worth, it's really immeasureable. At the lowest level I got the enjoyment of running a system. A step up, I saw how much other people enjoyed the system as well. A couple more steps up and I got a free-as-in-beer tutorial on programming (hacking WWIV...that was my "Introduction to CS 101"), not to mention protocols, interfaces, games, etc. At a slightly higher and less valuable (?!) level, I got the ability to talk to people in my field who are considerably older than me and sound like I know something and have some experience. THAT really IS invaluable.
The whole worth = money thing still bugs me, and I try to explain that to people who aren't in the computer field. Most don't get it, hopefully some do.
But see, that's the beauty of this guy's idea...mayor's can't just decide to bulldoze a few neighborhoods without passing it by the city council, offering to buy the people's land (at horribly reduced prices, granted) and then finally contracting with a company to do the bulldozing. So in this MMORPG, the mayor would have to bring it up in a board meeting and have it voted on.
In short, the SimCity would have to work like a real city or you're right, people would get very perturbed.
Theory: Microsoft wants to monopolize the console market.
How to make it work: Why don't they just take X number of units and give them away? They can afford it, it wouldn't be a huge hit on their budget (judging by the cover of at least half a dozen magazines last month, they have some reserves). My theory on console games is that once people have the consoles, they'll buy the games. Coughing up $200 for a console and THEN coughing up $50 per game is a bit steep, but if people got the console for free, I think their train of thought would be "Well, I have this game console,I need some games" and they would buy them.
By saturating the market, they'll sell more games, have a larger player base and be the most popular. Once everybody knows at least 1 person that has an XBox, I garantee they would spread. Quality or not, you give someone the console and you've garanteed at least 1-3 game purchases. Not to mention if someone is given an XBox, they (more than likely) won't go out and buy the Gamecube or PS2, they'll spend that $150/$200 on 4 games for their XBox.
There are just 3 factors that will decide whether the XBOX Live Network will fail or not:
I disagree, I think there's at least a fourth. The thing about game consoles is, they're immediate. With the old Nintendo you put your cartridge in, hit the power switch and you were playing Mario Bros. in under 5 seconds. When the playstation came out, it had that stupid splash screen and took so long to load that you could run and get a beer, hit the bathroom and still make it back in time for the opening credits.
If people want to play online computers games, they'll play them on the computer. Yes, yes, you'll have a certain percentage of the population that thinks computer games are stupid and only for the geeks. You'll also have the segment that really want to see how Halo does as a multiplayer game. It's kinda like the Star Wars phenomenon...even if every critic said the movie was a waste of time, you'd still have 100 people lined up opening night dressed as Jedis and Stormtroopers because they WANT to.
Another item to consider is how updateable a game is. With computers, you download an upgrade, install it, you're done. But that's never been the idea behind game consoles. Games on game consoles were practically treated as hardware. They were physical objects that you could manipulate with your hands, making them much easier for non-abstract thinkers to handle. They were also standalone. Your copy of Duck Hunt was the same as his, and hers, and theirs. Now, you'll need to download patches onto the XBox hard drive in order to play games, a concept that was familiar only to PCs in the past and something that, IMHO, console gamers never wanted to deal with.
Just my thoughts, but I kinda liked the idea of consoles games remaining consoles, disconnected form the world and FAST...Playstation made up for the speed with breakthrough graphics, but XBox is going to have to do one better, methinks.
Yeah, it is snobbery, but I believe it's well deserved snobbery. If, like you said, the CS degree is given through the engineering school then it probably is more of a software engineering degree and should be called that. But a great many CS majors that I know (it all depends on the university) graduated with a BA. They took the CpE's entry level courses (up through 1 or 2 2nd year classes) and that was it. No applied knowledge of hardware other than classes on drivers.
Ofcourse, it all depends on what kind of person you are and what kind of curriculum you went through. If you took dgitial design, good, it should be required for anyone working with a computer. Did you take microprocessor courses? Did you ever actually wire a computer together, solder in the connections and then write code for it? Our CS majors didn't, they never touched hardware. How about learning why memory is designed the way it is? Bus architecture? Software is all well and good, but it doesn't do much without the hardware so you should at least have an understanding of what you're developing a system on. I would argue that engineers think differently than other majors because of the type of coursework they had to take.
I didn't co-op, but I did intern every summer and worked as a sysadmin, programmer and hardware technician (which I define as a job that requires soldering and basic electrical knowledge) during the year for the college. I would consider that to have equal weight to a co-op.
Perhaps there shouldn't BE a software engineering title, since I don't really consider developing software to be an engineering practice. But it shouldn't be given to someone who hasn't gone through an engineering curriculum.
My idea of "acceptable" answers are C, C++ and Java
...I agree, but I'm not sure this is an either/or situation. You should HAVE to program in C/C++, whether or not you use it in the job market, it's probably the most well known and powerful language out there at a professional level.
VB, Ada, Pascal, Fortran, FORTH, COBOL and BASIC should send you running
...eh, all but Fortran. We used it in my freshman engineering courses. It's a good introduction to functional problem solving languages, great for math, and, while not used anymore, lots of people the generation above us ('us' being late teens, early 20's) used it and will respect your knowledge of it. If a college teaches VB, congratulations, you're now a Management Information Systems (MIS) major.
Lisp should make you cower in fear
...completely disagree. Oh, you'll cower in fear, but you need to learn LISP at some point to realize how nice other languages are:) Not to mention if you ever take an AI course or study genetic algorithms, you will be exposed to LISP/Scheme. It's not that bad, and it actually DOES have some interesting uses, such as writing good,compact code (bad LISP code is...)
I have to agree with you on one point...the software engineer title. I spent 4 years in school as a computer engineer only to come out and be working with lots of CS majors who called themselves software engineers. I feel like 'engineer' is a function of your training, similar to a doctor or a lawyer. Different mindset, different coursework. I think it's an earned title.
Let me add my "I agree with the first poster" comment. I don't think there are too many of us that DIDN'T find ourselves bored in our CS classes in HS/college and started writing games. If you love computers, it's almost inevitable that you will like at least some games just because you end up sitting in front of the computer so much of the time.
I wrote my first stupid little game in my CS class in HS. It was a Tron variant (light cycles, remember?) where you tried to make the other person crash into a wall. Lotsa fun, and someone suggested adding network support which got me thinking about that.
I'll go out on a limb and say that most people want to entertain, either themselves or others. People often want to go into acting or art because of the entertainment value. It's no surprise, then, that computer people would want to design computer entertainment, which is what games are.
Me personally, I have the same ambition. I've always wanted to work for a game company (Blizzard was my choice a few years ago, after Starcraft came out...it just plain blew me away). My buddy and I had the goal of working for one and then (eventually) starting our own. We figured we've played plenty of games in our lives, we know what people like, why couldn't we do it?
To start the process, we're designing a MUD based on Operation Overkill (BBS door game from days long gone). I know, no graphics, but even if I went into game programming as a career I would want to stay away from the graphics part of it and concentrate on the algorithms, math and gameplay. MUDs aren't terribly complex, so we're designing the MUDlib from scratch (read: every line of code is ours). My hope is to be able to gain a better understanding of game design, mostly the AI and shared world time between entities. I figure, what's a game like Diablo except a MUD that has a really snazzy frontend?
My hope (and I could be completely wrong, someone please tell me) is that if I can intelligently speak about AI, sketch out sample data objects that would be used, give a flow diagram for a game and even write some quick code, and point to an operational (if not tremendously popular) game that I've designed, I should be able to get my foot in the door. After this initial MUD release, we were planning on incorporating one of our other friends who is currently a frontend designer for 989 (did they get bought out?), who does Playstation 1/2 games. Taking some of the backend, revamping it and throwing a graphical interface on it will come with his help.
Honestly, one of the best ideas I had to learn game development was to take an existing game and try to design/redesign it yourself. Empire (anyone remember it?) was a great game that you could easily redo, including graphics. Pick an old RPG (Ultima?) and redo it with adjusted plots or AI. Something to get you learning to think like a game designer, instead of a data mover.
Slashdot Mirror
In the news, the VC++ debugger has come under fire from the RIAA for producing melodic tunes that sound very similar to several copyrighted materials.
"Whoever wrote the code that produced these tunes, we want to find them and bring them to justice." said Hillary Rosen, of the RIAA. "Neither Microsoft, nor the developer in question, has paid royalties to the artists whose songs they have violated. Renegade debuggers must be stopped, for they pose the greatest threat to the artists' intellectual property we've ever seen!"
<sigh> Fact is often stranger than fiction
This is, by far, the most useful use for a Dreamcast I've heard of.
--trb
Umm...I'm not sure this should have been modded at '+4 Funny'...more like '+5 Serious'
I wish this kind of event was publicized more (ie, you won't see this on nightly news in the DC area, more than likely). Whenever I talk about DRM, my non-technical friends stare at me blankly or, worse, label me 'one of those extremists' in the computer field. I try to explain that it will affect them in that they won't be able to listen to their own music on their computer, etc, but it usually gets a reply of "That would suck" and then they go on their way.
/. and the computer/legal professions really seems to be aware of this stuff. How do we make people more aware of the consequences of unopposed government restriction? That's my real question.
Nobody that I know outside of
Whatever the answer, I wish these groups the best of luck today.
--trb
That kind of surveillance would, however, be limited to obtaining a suspect's telephone number, IP address, URLs or e-mail header information--not the contents of online communications or telephone calls.
Okay, I'm thoroughly confused. So you think someone is 'hacking' into a system and may cause 'bodily harm'. You're allowed to find essentially the location of said individual, but you can't snoop the data in the packets, only the packet headers? Does this make sense to anyone else? How can you actually tell what someone is doing without looking at the data they're sending across.
OTOH, is this a loophole? "Sorry, you couldn't possibly have any idea what I was doing on that system unless you were snooping packet data, which is clearly illegal."
<sigh> Bartender, send those folks at the end of the bar a clue, on me...
--trb
According to research firm Gartner, the service has about 14 million registered users.
<sigh> I have to wonder if they're including the hotmail users in this number, since signing up for passport and hotmail are linked. If so, this number is hugely overinflated...the number of people actively using passport is way smaller. Too bad, companies may read this and decide it's a great way to reach a large audience.
--trb
So I won't be able to play MP3s on my PC any more?
And you can't play burned games in your Playstation, and copy protected games can't be duplicated, and servers that enforce cd-keys can't be worked around...
In the digital world, everything's a signal. You have an input signal and an output signal, and a black (or not so black) box between them. There will ALWAYS be a way around this type of encryption/protection/'feature'. The FUD that spreads on this topic really amazes me.
I liken this to Chris Rock's take on drugs (apologies ahead of time)...
"Even if you got rid of all the drugs...all the smack, all the herb, all the blow, it's not gonna matter. Why? Cause people wanna get high. You'll have guys becoming scientists down in their basement...
'Yo, check this out, check it out. If you take a baby's bottle, fill it with a little gasoline and a lima bean and suck, mista you'll be F'd up!'"
And the same applies to all this DRM crap. Someone will always come out with a workaround. Fifteen minutes after they release this motherboard with a smartchip on it, some guy will have an IC that you can solder over some leads that makes it worthless, or some software that intercepts the signal, changes it, and makes the chip think it's receiving legal information.
My only problem is the fact they're making law abiding citizens become criminals because we HAVE to.
--trb
Actually, if we're only talking $3K more on the initial price tag, sign me up...let's do some math.
(Before we begin, I live outside of D.C.)
Current gas price: $1.46/gal
Amount spent per week: around $23
Amount spent per year: 52 x $23 = $1196
Amount spent per year (45% better): $657.80
Savings: $538.20
So we're talking around 6 years to recoup your savings just from gas. I intend to have a car for >6 years, so yeah, I would buy this thing. Consider, also, gas prices have steadily gone up over the PAST 6 years, so you're actually talking about saving more than that.
--trb
Setting up a decoy file is a denial of service
Ummm....no. A decoy file may constitute a forgery and waste your time, but it's not denying a service. You're not stopping someone from being able to download a file or use a service, you're showing decoys that confuse them and waste their time.
Firstly, this is only an issue with music that is obtained illegally. Yeah, make the case of the guy downloading a song that he owns the CD for, but in 90%+ of the cases, this is aimed at illegal downloading. People who put their music out there to download WON'T HAVE DECOYS.
If we're all so concerned about being able to download music we own the rights to, why don't we just publish a list of checksums that would authenticate the songs? Have Kazaa, Limewire, etc then show these checksums. Easy way around decoys.
--trb
Look at the hostnames. Our works blocked out oscar.aol.com (I think that's it) and it successfully defeated AIM. I believe that most IMs use domain name lookups, so find the domain name and block that.
...IM actually IS a useful tool. We used to use it quite a bit before it got blocked. As a developer, it was more convenient than holding a phone up to my ear, I could respond at liberty when I had actually finished reading through something, and the person on the other side of the phone didn't have to listen to my random grunts, groans, hems and haws. Granted, you're going to have the group of people that abuse it, but I would have to say personally the benefits well outweighed the problems.
Stepping up on a soapbox for a second
--trb
Give me one example.
/. saying "Our rights and liberties are being taken away from us". Please, name one for me...concrete example. Go for it.
Seriously, I consider myself a somewhat more liberal than most Republican, yet I still criticize any part of the government that I see fit...and I haven't had one person accuse me of being anti-American. Searches in airports? God never decried "...and Man shall have unrestricted access to expedient travel". It's a privilege, not a right, that we are given. You don't like how airports are handling the situation? DON'T FLY. Drive, take a train, take a bus, you'll soon see these 'major' delays are nothing more than a slight inconvenience.
I keep seeing people on
--trb
By far the most annoying (and probably best) copy protections were for Empire and Bard's Tale III. Empire had you look up words in the manual (120+ pages) and enter the xth word on line y.
Bard's Tale III had a code wheel...with three wheels and around 20 entries per, with cutouts that showed through...truly annoying, but the best part was that they didn't ask you for it until, like, 5 hours into the game, so you could be playing for awhile and then start cursing them.
--trb
These CD's aren't about stopping Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa/etc
Actually, yeah, they are. They're just not going to DO that. Someone out there thinks that if they make it harder to put a CD in the computer, it will stop the online file sharing. Apparently that person missed the day they taught "Digital media 101" when they went over that it only takes 1 copy of something in digital form to spawn 10^x copies of it.
They seem to be treating CDs like cars. A car has proprietary pieces that you can't find anywhere and you would need special tools to take it apart and put it back together. If one person did this, no harm...other people WON'T do this and they can't directly benefit from that person's example. Digital media is not like this at all...one person gets a CD to work in their drive, makes a digital copy and suddenly it's like the record companies shouldn't have even bothered.
--trb
The concept that cost = worth = money is lost on me, I'm afraid.
I ran a BBS for years, and as almost any other Sysop can attest to, we invested more time in our boards than the majority of people who develop OSS (obvious exceptions, yada yada yada). However, when I think about what this cost me and what my board was worth, it's really immeasureable. At the lowest level I got the enjoyment of running a system. A step up, I saw how much other people enjoyed the system as well. A couple more steps up and I got a free-as-in-beer tutorial on programming (hacking WWIV...that was my "Introduction to CS 101"), not to mention protocols, interfaces, games, etc. At a slightly higher and less valuable (?!) level, I got the ability to talk to people in my field who are considerably older than me and sound like I know something and have some experience. THAT really IS invaluable.
The whole worth = money thing still bugs me, and I try to explain that to people who aren't in the computer field. Most don't get it, hopefully some do.
--trb
In related news, my penis is bigger than yours. However, user reviews say that yours performs slightly better.
Choose wisely.
Sorry to have missed it...
They must be slashdot editors.
...when they release a vi model, let me know
But see, that's the beauty of this guy's idea...mayor's can't just decide to bulldoze a few neighborhoods without passing it by the city council, offering to buy the people's land (at horribly reduced prices, granted) and then finally contracting with a company to do the bulldozing. So in this MMORPG, the mayor would have to bring it up in a board meeting and have it voted on.
In short, the SimCity would have to work like a real city or you're right, people would get very perturbed.
--trb
Theory: Microsoft wants to monopolize the console market.
How to make it work: Why don't they just take X number of units and give them away? They can afford it, it wouldn't be a huge hit on their budget (judging by the cover of at least half a dozen magazines last month, they have some reserves). My theory on console games is that once people have the consoles, they'll buy the games. Coughing up $200 for a console and THEN coughing up $50 per game is a bit steep, but if people got the console for free, I think their train of thought would be "Well, I have this game console,I need some games" and they would buy them.
By saturating the market, they'll sell more games, have a larger player base and be the most popular. Once everybody knows at least 1 person that has an XBox, I garantee they would spread. Quality or not, you give someone the console and you've garanteed at least 1-3 game purchases. Not to mention if someone is given an XBox, they (more than likely) won't go out and buy the Gamecube or PS2, they'll spend that $150/$200 on 4 games for their XBox.
Just a thought...
--trb
There are just 3 factors that will decide whether the XBOX Live Network will fail or not:
I disagree, I think there's at least a fourth. The thing about game consoles is, they're immediate. With the old Nintendo you put your cartridge in, hit the power switch and you were playing Mario Bros. in under 5 seconds.
When the playstation came out, it had that stupid splash screen and took so long to load that you could run and get a beer, hit the bathroom and still make it back in time for the opening credits.
If people want to play online computers games, they'll play them on the computer. Yes, yes, you'll have a certain percentage of the population that thinks computer games are stupid and only for the geeks. You'll also have the segment that really want to see how Halo does as a multiplayer game. It's kinda like the Star Wars phenomenon...even if every critic said the movie was a waste of time, you'd still have 100 people lined up opening night dressed as Jedis and Stormtroopers because they WANT to.
Another item to consider is how updateable a game is. With computers, you download an upgrade, install it, you're done. But that's never been the idea behind game consoles. Games on game consoles were practically treated as hardware. They were physical objects that you could manipulate with your hands, making them much easier for non-abstract thinkers to handle. They were also standalone. Your copy of Duck Hunt was the same as his, and hers, and theirs. Now, you'll need to download patches onto the XBox hard drive in order to play games, a concept that was familiar only to PCs in the past and something that, IMHO, console gamers never wanted to deal with.
Just my thoughts, but I kinda liked the idea of consoles games remaining consoles, disconnected form the world and FAST...Playstation made up for the speed with breakthrough graphics, but XBox is going to have to do one better, methinks.
--trb
Gimme a break. This is just snobery.
Yeah, it is snobbery, but I believe it's well deserved snobbery. If, like you said, the CS degree is given through the engineering school then it probably is more of a software engineering degree and should be called that. But a great many CS majors that I know (it all depends on the university) graduated with a BA. They took the CpE's entry level courses (up through 1 or 2 2nd year classes) and that was it. No applied knowledge of hardware other than classes on drivers.
Ofcourse, it all depends on what kind of person you are and what kind of curriculum you went through. If you took dgitial design, good, it should be required for anyone working with a computer. Did you take microprocessor courses? Did you ever actually wire a computer together, solder in the connections and then write code for it? Our CS majors didn't, they never touched hardware. How about learning why memory is designed the way it is? Bus architecture? Software is all well and good, but it doesn't do much without the hardware so you should at least have an understanding of what you're developing a system on. I would argue that engineers think differently than other majors because of the type of coursework they had to take.
I didn't co-op, but I did intern every summer and worked as a sysadmin, programmer and hardware technician (which I define as a job that requires soldering and basic electrical knowledge) during the year for the college. I would consider that to have equal weight to a co-op.
Perhaps there shouldn't BE a software engineering title, since I don't really consider developing software to be an engineering practice. But it shouldn't be given to someone who hasn't gone through an engineering curriculum.
--trb
My idea of "acceptable" answers are C, C++ and Java
:) Not to mention if you ever take an AI course or study genetic algorithms, you will be exposed to LISP/Scheme. It's not that bad, and it actually DOES have some interesting uses, such as writing good,compact code (bad LISP code is...)
...I agree, but I'm not sure this is an either/or situation. You should HAVE to program in C/C++, whether or not you use it in the job market, it's probably the most well known and powerful language out there at a professional level.
VB, Ada, Pascal, Fortran, FORTH, COBOL and BASIC should send you running
...eh, all but Fortran. We used it in my freshman engineering courses. It's a good introduction to functional problem solving languages, great for math, and, while not used anymore, lots of people the generation above us ('us' being late teens, early 20's) used it and will respect your knowledge of it. If a college teaches VB, congratulations, you're now a Management Information Systems (MIS) major.
Lisp should make you cower in fear
...completely disagree. Oh, you'll cower in fear, but you need to learn LISP at some point to realize how nice other languages are
Just my $.02
--trb
I have to agree with you on one point...the software engineer title. I spent 4 years in school as a computer engineer only to come out and be working with lots of CS majors who called themselves software engineers. I feel like 'engineer' is a function of your training, similar to a doctor or a lawyer. Different mindset, different coursework. I think it's an earned title.
--trb
Let me add my "I agree with the first poster" comment. I don't think there are too many of us that DIDN'T find ourselves bored in our CS classes in HS/college and started writing games. If you love computers, it's almost inevitable that you will like at least some games just because you end up sitting in front of the computer so much of the time.
I wrote my first stupid little game in my CS class in HS. It was a Tron variant (light cycles, remember?) where you tried to make the other person crash into a wall. Lotsa fun, and someone suggested adding network support which got me thinking about that.
I'll go out on a limb and say that most people want to entertain, either themselves or others. People often want to go into acting or art because of the entertainment value. It's no surprise, then, that computer people would want to design computer entertainment, which is what games are.
--trb
Me personally, I have the same ambition. I've always wanted to work for a game company (Blizzard was my choice a few years ago, after Starcraft came out...it just plain blew me away). My buddy and I had the goal of working for one and then (eventually) starting our own. We figured we've played plenty of games in our lives, we know what people like, why couldn't we do it?
To start the process, we're designing a MUD based on Operation Overkill (BBS door game from days long gone). I know, no graphics, but even if I went into game programming as a career I would want to stay away from the graphics part of it and concentrate on the algorithms, math and gameplay. MUDs aren't terribly complex, so we're designing the MUDlib from scratch (read: every line of code is ours). My hope is to be able to gain a better understanding of game design, mostly the AI and shared world time between entities. I figure, what's a game like Diablo except a MUD that has a really snazzy frontend?
My hope (and I could be completely wrong, someone please tell me) is that if I can intelligently speak about AI, sketch out sample data objects that would be used, give a flow diagram for a game and even write some quick code, and point to an operational (if not tremendously popular) game that I've designed, I should be able to get my foot in the door. After this initial MUD release, we were planning on incorporating one of our other friends who is currently a frontend designer for 989 (did they get bought out?), who does Playstation 1/2 games. Taking some of the backend, revamping it and throwing a graphical interface on it will come with his help.
Honestly, one of the best ideas I had to learn game development was to take an existing game and try to design/redesign it yourself. Empire (anyone remember it?) was a great game that you could easily redo, including graphics. Pick an old RPG (Ultima?) and redo it with adjusted plots or AI. Something to get you learning to think like a game designer, instead of a data mover.
--trb