There was this company called Active Enterprises. It basically amounted to a guy in his garage making games. They had a cart called Action 52 for the NES which had 52 games on it. Of course to call these things "games" was a stretch - most were like quick coding excercises. The idea was that they would make up for in quantity what they lacked in quantity. At an asking price of $199.99 its unclear if his target audience was Blockbuster (which is used to getting hosed with rental pricing) or parents who figured that 52 games at the price of four was a deal.
One of the games on Action 52 was The Cheetahmen. Apparently Active Enterprises also wrote a game called Cheetahmen II . I say apparently because Active never released it. It appears that what happened was Active ordered 1,000 copies of Cheetahmen II and then couldn't pay the manufacturer for the carts, so after a year or two the manufacturer just sold them to people (which is legal).
So, Cheetahmen II is probably one of the rarest cartridges ever made.
You're in luck - there's an adapter for the GBA called the e-Card reader. You swipe special cards in it that have data along their edges. The decks are NES games - one of them is Excitebike. Once you get past the $70 GBA investment and the ~$40 for the card reader, the decks are $5 each. There's also some more NES titles. This, coupled with the ulockable Metroid in Metroid Prime is proof to me that Nintendo hasn't forgotten their roots.
Part of what led to the video game crash was the proliferation of poor quality, quickly produced games that were flooding the market. Chase The Chuckwagon came to typify exactly the type of game that was being rushed out to "cash in" on the video game craze.
You're right about the reasons for why the video game industry crashed. However, this particular game, due to its distribution method, low number of produced cartridges, and known ending (that many of them were destroyed) does make it rare.
What did more to crash the industry circa 1982 was the horrible port of Pac-Man for the 2600 and of course E.T. for the 2600. In 1982 only 10 million of the 20 million 2600 systems were in active use, but Atari made 12 million Pac-Man carts, meaning they expected every single active 2600 user to buy the game, plus 2 million more (either new users or old users with new interest). It didn't work. And as for E.T., they spent $25 million to get the rights to E.T. and paid some programmer to get the game done in six weeks so they could shove it out the door. The game is literally impossible to finish and only sold 1 million of the 5 million cartridges made - most of the rest made it into a landfill in New Mexico.
This is what killed the game industry in the early 1980's.
The two "new" consoles have been out a year now, and now have more than one game worth buying (especially GameCube), so it makes sense that they would be selling. There's only so much holiday buying money to go around, so the fact that the PC is down by only 6% is surprising.
One of the things that PC's do well is Internet Multiplayer. All three consoles require you to purchase something (even Xbox which had it "built in" already) to get online. When you can play a game online, you'll play it more.
For that matter, the PC has the MMORPG, something the consoles have only flirted with so far. Pehaps EverQuest isn't moving as many boxes as they used to but the 200,000 people paying $12.99 per month to play mean that the game is still making money. For that matter, when you have a game like an MMORPG that requires a large time investment and a monthly bill, you're less likely to go out and buy more games (which is why I don't touch 'em).
PC games can be modified and extended. Check out Neverwinter Nights which you can pretty much play forever, especially online. Plus there's all the FPS modifications.
By that logic, NWN debuted with a $60 price tag - makes sense, given the replay value. PC games are sometimes more expensive, which is hurting their sales.
True, it's possible to pirate console games, but it's uncommon. Few if any fool with mod chips or have DVD burners (Joe Public, not Joe Slashot). PC game piracy is much more common.
Finally, consoles don't need intelligence. Anyone can pop in a disc and fire up a game. PC games require installation, fiddling, and while people like me love this, Joe Public hates it.
Now I just got a GameCube and Metroid Prime, so I can swing both ways on this issue, but I do prefer PC games. However, console games will always have the apple of the public's eye.
No, if the RIAA ran BREW then the games would be $19 each and only $1 would get back to the author. You wouldn't be able to download anything - you'd have to physically buy it in stores. And then one day your game would suddenly not run, to which the RIAA's response would be to buy a new phone since it's not their fault your phone is not compliant.
First off, check the dates on the posts in the forums - the first batch of Verizon T720's (circa October) were recalled due to buggy firmware.
Second, the majority of the people in the alt.cellular.verizon group aren't mad that the T720 is bad, they're mainly mad that "next generation feature X" isn't in it. True, the T720 isn't the holy grail of high end cell phones - it's a "lite" entry for those who want a color screen.
Finally, most of the newsgroup complaints come from people whose coverage area is bad. It may be that the T720 is less forgiving of bad service. Well, I've had one for a month now and I've been all through Texas with no problem. Perhaps Verizon just likes the Lone Star State.
Yeah, look at it this way - BREW guarantees that authors get compensated for their work and, in the case of Verizon, that nothing damaging gets uploaded to the phone.
Of course I know the theory behind J2ME and Java in general is that everything runs in a sandbox, but someone can still in theory write malicious J2ME code and unleash it on others. BREW checks everything before it goes through.
But with BREW the final author gets compensated. If you're Joe Hobbyist this is unimportant but if you're EA (they already have a version of Tiger Woods for the Verizon phones), this is important. No piracy, and people are more likely to buy something if it's just $5 or $6 on their monthly bill (games are a one-time download for a one-time fee).
Plus, BREW development is done in C/C++, which is nice if you already know or prefer C/C++.
This is a good article to point out something - that BREW isn't for hobbyists. However not everyone is interested in free-as-in-anything. Some people want to (and deserve to) get paid. And more people will buy BREW games from Get It Now through Verizon (especially now that they have an actual Two Towers game and an EverQuest game on the way) than will ever type in a URL on a web browser.
So I disagree with BREW being "bad for consumers" - it's only bad in the same way that downloading ringtones for $2 a pop is bad. And if no one uses it it will go away. If it doesn't go away it might be a good way to get paid for your work in a world of piracy.
I don't really know shit about sound but I remember hearing a long time ago how the main reason vinyl had the potential to sound better was because of sampling rates. A CD has a 44.1kHz sampling rate, but since a vinyl record has one single groove, its sound isn't "limited" by sampling rate. By way of comparison with numbers, a vinyl record has a sampling rate of infinity. Of course, this ultimately proved less important to Joe Consumer than things like portability and durability, and rightfully so.
Further, the shift to CD's wasn't because the RIAA "said so" - the recording industry's come out with several format duds (8-tracks?), it was just the fortunate exodus to CD's that revitalized the industry 20 years ago. Of course, the CD is seeing nice improvements in sound quality thanks to things like SACD and DVD-Audio - but now the public has stated that such things are less important. The public on the whole is perfectly content in downloading a 128kbps MP3 with no packaging (and no pricetag) and doesn't care about higher sampling rates or 5.1 surround sound.
Perhaps the whole music industry will be a niche industry at some point...
I assume the "uncontrollable projectile vomiting" was in reference to The Blair Witch Project, which did cause that (due to ShakyCam) and was "guaranteed" two sequels, but after Book of Shadows tanked they wouldn't let it have the second sequel.
that's fine for the developer's statistics, but the game company only cares about what sells, not in what people might be running it on. In the case of id Software, who is going to develop the game for different platforms anyway, it's not a big deal - they could have delivered the three platforms in one box. If you're Bioware and you're trying to convince your publisher that it's worth the effort to hold off on the finished product of Neverwinter Nights until you can finish the Linux and Mac ports, you need the numbers of people who would actually not buy the game and have that be a significant number. While the Slashdot and Mac crowds are very angry that NWN still doesn't have clients for their platforms, the fact that it sold quite well "despite" only being for Windows isn't hurting the feelings of Infrogrames/Atari one bit.
The Phantom Menace, financially, was hardly a flop. However, most people were disappointed by it - even the ones who liked it found it little disappointing. My point was that even sure fire formulas can miss.
well the Linux thing is worse than that. Witness Quake 3 on Linux from Loki. Production difficulties (IIRC) pushed it back from the Windows release, missing the Christmas window in most retail locations. So most Linux gamers, being dual-booters, just bought the Windows version and decided to hold tight for the patch id Software promised would be coming after Christmas (and quite a while after Christmas as it turned out). As a result, the Windows version sold about 95% of the copies, Mac just over 4%, and Linux just under 1% of the copies sold. Given that most places I know would sooner carry Linux games than Mac games, that's impressive for Mac and debilitating for Linux (I got these figures from an id Employee - Carmack, I believe - posting on Slashdot regarding Loki).
And despite the fact that this statistic is three years old now, it's still used by marketing department of game companies to make decisions. Quake 3 was pretty much the closest thing to a good test of the Linux/Mac/Windows market, though still not right. If a game were to come out and have boxed copies of all three platforms I mentioned on the same day in all stores then that would be a good test, but that hasn't happened yet. Neverwinter Nights was going to be it but Infogrames went with that 95%. Warcraft 3 said two out of three ain't bad, and Unreal Tournament 2003 did ship with a Linux client in the box but it was unadvertised and marketing gurus don't put too much real faith in registration cards.
Well it did occur to me that I'm not sure if I leave my door unlocked when I'm at home during the day, but then again I don't live in a major mertopolitan city. Had Moore tried the same trick in NYC in a project during the day he'd gotten different results. Still, it would be impressive to me if the citizens of a major city in Canada didn't lock their doors at night.
The title is taken from the little-known fact that the two killers, Dylan and Eric, were supposed to be in bowling class at Columbine High School on the morning of the murders. At least five witnesses, including their teacher, told the police that they saw one or both boys that morning at the bowling alley for their first hour class. Some school and law enforcement officials later maintained that the two boys skipped that class that morning yet no other witness has come forward to say they saw Eric and Dylan anywhere else that morning.
One reason the film is called "Bowling For Columbine" is that, after the massacre, all the pundits and experts started blaming all the usual suspects that are wheeled out for blame whenever a school shooting occurs--evil rock music (in this case Marilyn Manson), violent video games, and bad parenting.
My point is that those scapegoats make about as much sense as blaming bowling. After all, Eric and Dylan were bowlers, they took bowling class at Columbine--was bowling responsible for their evil deeds? If they bowled that morning, did the bowling trigger their desire to commit mass murder? Or, if they skipped their bowling class that morning, did that bring on the massacre? Had they bowled, that may have altered their mood and prevented them from picking up their guns. As you can see, this is all nonsense, just as it is nonsense to blame Marilyn Manson.
The title suggests other metaphors for the state of the nation which are best left to the viewers and their imagination.
Remember how Gateway ran that commercial that "respected your rights to download music" (or somesuch). I took that commercial to be a slap to the face of the RIAA - now they're the RIAA's lapdog? Or have I completely misread this?
well not to turn this into my own personal Blog or anything but the main reason is that I'm planning on moving anyway - I always have been. True, I'll be getting rid of a very stable tech job, which is scary, but I need to get out and try more while my age is still an asset instead of a liability.
Unless I am mistaken, it is a reference to a Russian comedian named Yakov Smirnov. Back in the early 80's at the height of the Cold War he did his act in American night clubs, and a staple of the routine was to turn around some phrase, i.e. "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!" This was done to make light of the Russian government, and play on America's fear of communism.
Due to his extremely chipper demenaor and the fact that his routine rarely changed, he became an annoying cliche. In the years since the Cold War ended and stand up comedy became less popular he apparently retreated to Branson, Missouri and has a theater there.
Somewhat akin to the "all your base..." phonomeon, this "In Soviet Russia..." thing didn't become its own overused cliche until posters on FARK, the Slashdot of weird journalism, started adding Smirnov into their Photoshop contests, along with Admiral "It's A Trap!" Ackbar, the squirrel with the giant nuts, and that kitten that dies when you masrutbate.
Nah, just the ones working here. Which is why I'm leaving soon - I'm still young with no kids or tying factors, and I need a place with a future. Or even a desire for one.
A while back I checked out his site and he had given someone the rights to translate Thinking in Java (2nd Edition, I presume), into Thinking in C#. It was available for download was a "Version 0.1" where any code in red was still Java - black code was translated into C#. I'm not sure how much text was neccessary to translate, but it was essentially "ported" to C#.
Apparently at the beginning of November they changed it to where instead of being a free unrestricted download it's a $10 unprintable PDF. This was done since universities were cancelling their orders for the book since students could print it out (using university resources no less), which they decided was unfair to them (the author/publisher). The book itself isn't out until February.
Now here's the question I have - what does this say about C# or Java that the universities (presumably) aren't doing this same thing with Java? They don't mind that anyone can download TiJ for free and print it out, but they do mind for TiC#? In his FAQ Eckel goes on about how it's a good thing professors can use his book in classes before it comes out for real - now that's a bad thing?
I guess the main thing is that it smacks of the same sort of drama that surrounded the University of Waterloo and their teaching of C# (they were to recieve $1M from Microsoft, but then Waterloo decided to stew on the idea for a year).
I work at a fairly large university. We run our student information system on an AS/400 mainframe, and I work on the billing side of it. What's struck me about this place is that while the mainframe is old (circa 1985), the people are older still.
Recently we added the ability for the students to pay their bills online via the web, taking a bold step into 1998, albeit four years late. In fact, we mainly only did it because another university in this state (the bigger one) did it, and we didn't want to look like we were behind. The software to do this literally just adds more layers to the mainframe process. That was easier than moving to a new system. While the seasoned web pro got to use ASP.NET and C#, I'm sitting here at the age of 25 writing COBOL from scratch to be able to post transactions he captures. That the process is disconnected and difficult to keep in sync no one seems to mind.
They say that we're getting a new, web-based system, "in about six months". I'm still not sure if this means no more mainframe, but apparently the project has been six months away for about two years now.
My coworkers fall into three categories - people younger than me who are still in school and are getting the heck out of here when they graduate, people my age who are married (like me) but they have kids and are completely stuck here, and people who are much older than me. One of my coworkers is literally a grandmother who codes COBOL and hates computers.
And that's really the big problem. I'm sure COBOL and Natural (a pseudo-scripting language for the ADABAS databases we use) are fine languages but you'd never know it by the way they're used here. I recieved no training once I got here - I was literally thrown in with a vague premise of further training, only to have the promiser go on to a better job. I was able to swim and get promoted within fifteen months.
People here aren't concerned with keeping their skillset up to date, they're more concerned with getting their kids to little league practice. The guy across the room from me is trying like hell to get a better job, but he's 56, divorced, in hellacious debt, he knows one thing (COBOL), and he steadfastly refuses to learn anything else. He's like the guy with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. He regularly gets turned down for jobs he's perfect for in favor of young, know nothing punks (like me).
A few months back (for some reason) they gave us VB.net training. While everyone in the room looked terrified of object oriented programming, I was making shit dance across the screen and rewriting everything in C# for kicks. That we're a 80% conservative university that's terrified of change doesn't help things either. My coworkers are mostly more concerned with keeping the new stuff out so that they don't have to learn anything new before they retire.
Now, I'm not saying that Mainframes are evil or that people's natural desire to stay the same is dragging anything down, but part of the reason Mainframes are still around is due to a complete reluctance to upgrade. Sure, at some point it will become inevitable, but most of my co-workers are ready and willing to put that off until after they retire.
And I'm not saying that everything should always be re-written in "flavor of the month" language to run on "hardware platform of the moment", that's not practical either. I mainly think we're seeing the results of a generation and a mentality that started at the low end of the Moore's Law curve and attacked it like any other job. People here don't see programming as a passion, but that thing they do until they go home (not unlike people who sell radio air time or something trivial like that).
As for me, I'm getting out of here as soon as I can.
Slashdot Mirror
There was this company called Active Enterprises. It basically amounted to a guy in his garage making games. They had a cart called Action 52 for the NES which had 52 games on it. Of course to call these things "games" was a stretch - most were like quick coding excercises. The idea was that they would make up for in quantity what they lacked in quantity. At an asking price of $199.99 its unclear if his target audience was Blockbuster (which is used to getting hosed with rental pricing) or parents who figured that 52 games at the price of four was a deal.
One of the games on Action 52 was The Cheetahmen. Apparently Active Enterprises also wrote a game called Cheetahmen II . I say apparently because Active never released it. It appears that what happened was Active ordered 1,000 copies of Cheetahmen II and then couldn't pay the manufacturer for the carts, so after a year or two the manufacturer just sold them to people (which is legal).
So, Cheetahmen II is probably one of the rarest cartridges ever made.
There's a new Master Blaster game, Master Blaster: Blasting Again for the PSX. It's cheap and worth a look.
What did more to crash the industry circa 1982 was the horrible port of Pac-Man for the 2600 and of course E.T. for the 2600. In 1982 only 10 million of the 20 million 2600 systems were in active use, but Atari made 12 million Pac-Man carts, meaning they expected every single active 2600 user to buy the game, plus 2 million more (either new users or old users with new interest). It didn't work. And as for E.T., they spent $25 million to get the rights to E.T. and paid some programmer to get the game done in six weeks so they could shove it out the door. The game is literally impossible to finish and only sold 1 million of the 5 million cartridges made - most of the rest made it into a landfill in New Mexico.
This is what killed the game industry in the early 1980's.
- The two "new" consoles have been out a year now, and now have more than one game worth buying (especially GameCube), so it makes sense that they would be selling. There's only so much holiday buying money to go around, so the fact that the PC is down by only 6% is surprising.
- One of the things that PC's do well is Internet Multiplayer. All three consoles require you to purchase something (even Xbox which had it "built in" already) to get online. When you can play a game online, you'll play it more.
- For that matter, the PC has the MMORPG, something the consoles have only flirted with so far. Pehaps EverQuest isn't moving as many boxes as they used to but the 200,000 people paying $12.99 per month to play mean that the game is still making money. For that matter, when you have a game like an MMORPG that requires a large time investment and a monthly bill, you're less likely to go out and buy more games (which is why I don't touch 'em).
- PC games can be modified and extended. Check out Neverwinter Nights which you can pretty much play forever, especially online. Plus there's all the FPS modifications.
- By that logic, NWN debuted with a $60 price tag - makes sense, given the replay value. PC games are sometimes more expensive, which is hurting their sales.
- True, it's possible to pirate console games, but it's uncommon. Few if any fool with mod chips or have DVD burners (Joe Public, not Joe Slashot). PC game piracy is much more common.
- Finally, consoles don't need intelligence. Anyone can pop in a disc and fire up a game. PC games require installation, fiddling, and while people like me love this, Joe Public hates it.
Now I just got a GameCube and Metroid Prime, so I can swing both ways on this issue, but I do prefer PC games. However, console games will always have the apple of the public's eye.No, if the RIAA ran BREW then the games would be $19 each and only $1 would get back to the author. You wouldn't be able to download anything - you'd have to physically buy it in stores. And then one day your game would suddenly not run, to which the RIAA's response would be to buy a new phone since it's not their fault your phone is not compliant.
Second, the majority of the people in the alt.cellular.verizon group aren't mad that the T720 is bad, they're mainly mad that "next generation feature X" isn't in it. True, the T720 isn't the holy grail of high end cell phones - it's a "lite" entry for those who want a color screen.
Finally, most of the newsgroup complaints come from people whose coverage area is bad. It may be that the T720 is less forgiving of bad service. Well, I've had one for a month now and I've been all through Texas with no problem. Perhaps Verizon just likes the Lone Star State.
Of course I know the theory behind J2ME and Java in general is that everything runs in a sandbox, but someone can still in theory write malicious J2ME code and unleash it on others. BREW checks everything before it goes through.
But with BREW the final author gets compensated. If you're Joe Hobbyist this is unimportant but if you're EA (they already have a version of Tiger Woods for the Verizon phones), this is important. No piracy, and people are more likely to buy something if it's just $5 or $6 on their monthly bill (games are a one-time download for a one-time fee).
Plus, BREW development is done in C/C++, which is nice if you already know or prefer C/C++.
This is a good article to point out something - that BREW isn't for hobbyists. However not everyone is interested in free-as-in-anything. Some people want to (and deserve to) get paid. And more people will buy BREW games from Get It Now through Verizon (especially now that they have an actual Two Towers game and an EverQuest game on the way) than will ever type in a URL on a web browser.
So I disagree with BREW being "bad for consumers" - it's only bad in the same way that downloading ringtones for $2 a pop is bad. And if no one uses it it will go away. If it doesn't go away it might be a good way to get paid for your work in a world of piracy.
Further, the shift to CD's wasn't because the RIAA "said so" - the recording industry's come out with several format duds (8-tracks?), it was just the fortunate exodus to CD's that revitalized the industry 20 years ago. Of course, the CD is seeing nice improvements in sound quality thanks to things like SACD and DVD-Audio - but now the public has stated that such things are less important. The public on the whole is perfectly content in downloading a 128kbps MP3 with no packaging (and no pricetag) and doesn't care about higher sampling rates or 5.1 surround sound.
Perhaps the whole music industry will be a niche industry at some point...
...how many people thought Russia was being fucked by Internet Information Server?
I assume the "uncontrollable projectile vomiting" was in reference to The Blair Witch Project, which did cause that (due to ShakyCam) and was "guaranteed" two sequels, but after Book of Shadows tanked they wouldn't let it have the second sequel.
that's fine for the developer's statistics, but the game company only cares about what sells, not in what people might be running it on. In the case of id Software, who is going to develop the game for different platforms anyway, it's not a big deal - they could have delivered the three platforms in one box. If you're Bioware and you're trying to convince your publisher that it's worth the effort to hold off on the finished product of Neverwinter Nights until you can finish the Linux and Mac ports, you need the numbers of people who would actually not buy the game and have that be a significant number. While the Slashdot and Mac crowds are very angry that NWN still doesn't have clients for their platforms, the fact that it sold quite well "despite" only being for Windows isn't hurting the feelings of Infrogrames/Atari one bit.
The Phantom Menace, financially, was hardly a flop. However, most people were disappointed by it - even the ones who liked it found it little disappointing. My point was that even sure fire formulas can miss.
- Original director from first film
- Big budget
- A script that's been in the works for years
- Beloved franchise
- Original actors where possible
Sounds like it can't go wrong, right?Can you say The Phantom Menace?
And despite the fact that this statistic is three years old now, it's still used by marketing department of game companies to make decisions. Quake 3 was pretty much the closest thing to a good test of the Linux/Mac/Windows market, though still not right. If a game were to come out and have boxed copies of all three platforms I mentioned on the same day in all stores then that would be a good test, but that hasn't happened yet. Neverwinter Nights was going to be it but Infogrames went with that 95%. Warcraft 3 said two out of three ain't bad, and Unreal Tournament 2003 did ship with a Linux client in the box but it was unadvertised and marketing gurus don't put too much real faith in registration cards.
Well it did occur to me that I'm not sure if I leave my door unlocked when I'm at home during the day, but then again I don't live in a major mertopolitan city. Had Moore tried the same trick in NYC in a project during the day he'd gotten different results. Still, it would be impressive to me if the citizens of a major city in Canada didn't lock their doors at night.
Remember how Gateway ran that commercial that "respected your rights to download music" (or somesuch). I took that commercial to be a slap to the face of the RIAA - now they're the RIAA's lapdog? Or have I completely misread this?
well not to turn this into my own personal Blog or anything but the main reason is that I'm planning on moving anyway - I always have been. True, I'll be getting rid of a very stable tech job, which is scary, but I need to get out and try more while my age is still an asset instead of a liability.
Feel free to mod me down now, my karma can take the hit.
Due to his extremely chipper demenaor and the fact that his routine rarely changed, he became an annoying cliche. In the years since the Cold War ended and stand up comedy became less popular he apparently retreated to Branson, Missouri and has a theater there.
Somewhat akin to the "all your base..." phonomeon, this "In Soviet Russia..." thing didn't become its own overused cliche until posters on FARK, the Slashdot of weird journalism, started adding Smirnov into their Photoshop contests, along with Admiral "It's A Trap!" Ackbar, the squirrel with the giant nuts, and that kitten that dies when you masrutbate.
Apparently at the beginning of November they changed it to where instead of being a free unrestricted download it's a $10 unprintable PDF. This was done since universities were cancelling their orders for the book since students could print it out (using university resources no less), which they decided was unfair to them (the author/publisher). The book itself isn't out until February.
Now here's the question I have - what does this say about C# or Java that the universities (presumably) aren't doing this same thing with Java? They don't mind that anyone can download TiJ for free and print it out, but they do mind for TiC#? In his FAQ Eckel goes on about how it's a good thing professors can use his book in classes before it comes out for real - now that's a bad thing?
I guess the main thing is that it smacks of the same sort of drama that surrounded the University of Waterloo and their teaching of C# (they were to recieve $1M from Microsoft, but then Waterloo decided to stew on the idea for a year).
Recently we added the ability for the students to pay their bills online via the web, taking a bold step into 1998, albeit four years late. In fact, we mainly only did it because another university in this state (the bigger one) did it, and we didn't want to look like we were behind. The software to do this literally just adds more layers to the mainframe process. That was easier than moving to a new system. While the seasoned web pro got to use ASP.NET and C#, I'm sitting here at the age of 25 writing COBOL from scratch to be able to post transactions he captures. That the process is disconnected and difficult to keep in sync no one seems to mind.
They say that we're getting a new, web-based system, "in about six months". I'm still not sure if this means no more mainframe, but apparently the project has been six months away for about two years now.
My coworkers fall into three categories - people younger than me who are still in school and are getting the heck out of here when they graduate, people my age who are married (like me) but they have kids and are completely stuck here, and people who are much older than me. One of my coworkers is literally a grandmother who codes COBOL and hates computers.
And that's really the big problem. I'm sure COBOL and Natural (a pseudo-scripting language for the ADABAS databases we use) are fine languages but you'd never know it by the way they're used here. I recieved no training once I got here - I was literally thrown in with a vague premise of further training, only to have the promiser go on to a better job. I was able to swim and get promoted within fifteen months.
People here aren't concerned with keeping their skillset up to date, they're more concerned with getting their kids to little league practice. The guy across the room from me is trying like hell to get a better job, but he's 56, divorced, in hellacious debt, he knows one thing (COBOL), and he steadfastly refuses to learn anything else. He's like the guy with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. He regularly gets turned down for jobs he's perfect for in favor of young, know nothing punks (like me).
A few months back (for some reason) they gave us VB.net training. While everyone in the room looked terrified of object oriented programming, I was making shit dance across the screen and rewriting everything in C# for kicks. That we're a 80% conservative university that's terrified of change doesn't help things either. My coworkers are mostly more concerned with keeping the new stuff out so that they don't have to learn anything new before they retire.
Now, I'm not saying that Mainframes are evil or that people's natural desire to stay the same is dragging anything down, but part of the reason Mainframes are still around is due to a complete reluctance to upgrade. Sure, at some point it will become inevitable, but most of my co-workers are ready and willing to put that off until after they retire.
And I'm not saying that everything should always be re-written in "flavor of the month" language to run on "hardware platform of the moment", that's not practical either. I mainly think we're seeing the results of a generation and a mentality that started at the low end of the Moore's Law curve and attacked it like any other job. People here don't see programming as a passion, but that thing they do until they go home (not unlike people who sell radio air time or something trivial like that).
As for me, I'm getting out of here as soon as I can.