Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one 'mass communications officer' by name, who has since received death threats for 'simply doing his job posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.
Yeah. And I wish these people would get off my back about my job: processing street children into delicious meat pies.
What have these liberal bastards got against meat pies?
People often forget that Anarchy within months breaks down into feudal warlordship. I.E. if you oust a government, another one will rise very, very quickly.
In other words, you can shatter the current system, but you can't shatter the global truth that money leads to power. Generally, a ruling system has to be more built up to separate the two, rather than less.
This reminds me of how one can send child porn unsolicited to congressmen, and the recipient is liable for steep legal penalties. In this particular case, how would Berman react if he were sent a dozen MP3's only to have his computer seized?
Sometimes I wish congresspeople would think about the consequences of their legislation before they make them. Sometimes I wish people would show them.
1. Apple creates proprietary iTunes schema, as none such existed in the market. Sticks with it for ten years. Starts to transition to universal MP3's.
Microsoft:
1. Microsoft creates proprietary PlaysForSure schema in response to apple. Partners with lots of companies to push as an proprietary but licenceable standard. Sells PlaysForSure tracks on MSN.com.
2. Microsoft abandons PlaysForSure, destroying the standard. Microsoft instead sells the Zune, with zune-specific music tracks.
3. Microsoft sticks PlaysForSure and Zune DRM together as "Certified for Vista." Except that things which are all "Certified for Vista" will play with Vista, but won't actually play with eachother. And it will play with non-Vista things. Right.
So the music player with an estimated 2% of the market is paired with an OS that has 6%. Good luck with that!
Why is it suddenly technology becomes the big evil because it can be used for bad things? Inserting system-related warnings into the HTTP stream seems totally reasonable, although I'd rather they'd replace whole pages rather than insert.
But that doesn't mean the technology is evil any more than the perl which powers the engine is evil.
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time.... mainly because of one time-consuming thing: building up the user base.
Actually, as a game developer, I'm going with A: tens of thousands of hours of content to churn, B: a multi-server technological platform infrastructure which is both synchronized and massively parallel across disparate random hardware, C: character separation via deep customization and minimum 5 - 8 primary paths, and D: intricate system interactions frequently orders of magnitude deeper than traditional RPG's. This is why almost all MMORPG's out there take 5 years to get to Beta, with development teams in the hundreds.
Many MMO's build up a sustainable userbase in a couple of years. WoW broke in about a month. Guild Wars... maybe 5 months. Puzzle Pirates seemed to take about two years. But however much a daunting task it is to get a population there, the actual building of any MMO is an insane PITFA. I'd guesstimate MMOs require about 4 - 5 times the team size and development time of a normal game.
Why would real researchers need more images of the lunar surface? Visual images aren't what's really used for creating detailed maps, and images of that region of the moon have existed for years anyway.
I think his point is that while 200$ per child + ongoing upkeep may be "giving" a library of books by our standards, it doesn't meet the needs of a population in a region dominated by subsistence scavaging and unemployment.
And in some ways I'd have to agree. There is this strangely pervasive belief that if these people were only better educated, they'd miraculously pop out of poverty. There always feels like a twinge of latent racism in the "educate these people and they'll be fine" argument. This ignores many other important factors like available capital for new businesses, unfavorable political climates, a lack of inherent natural resources, exploding birthrates, poor sanitation and health, etc. All of which are important to creating a thriving population.
On the other hand, if you need sanitation improved through mass construction of lavatories, the Silicon Valley is not the place to go. OLPC is the right contribution that particular people can make to improving the lives of third-world students. It doesn't meet their immediate needs in any shape or form, but hopefully it will contribute to their ability to understand their local political climate, facilitate launching of businesses, etc.
P.S., if you want to make a lasting change without the OLPC, try loaning money at Kiva. Help a 3rd world business meet regional needs without unsustainable handouts.
Can someone quickly update us on the state of getting Koffice running on Windows? I vaguely remember it was KDE 3.5 that was supposed to precipitate the QT switcheroo which would facilitate compatibility.
In other words, It will now have to pay its fair share of taxes, same as other businesses.
Except other labor-only services pay no such tax. Specifically, any maintenence services (as opposed to fabrication of new items) are not taxed. From the Maryland tax code web page:
On the other hand, charges for repairing or restoring an existing item of tangible personal property to its original condition are not subject to tax. A charge for reconfiguring or enhancing existing tangible personal property, unless it results in the creation of a new and different item of tangible personal property, is also not taxable.
Essentially, IT is being singled out for paying taxes whereas other labor types do not. There is no tax on having your accounting done, but now there is a tax on having your accounting software debugged. There isn't a tax on having your car fixed, but there is a tax on having your servers fixed. There is no tax on having your nails done, or having your lawn mowed, or having your house painted. Why are technology services being singled out in this respect?
Guides are frequently written by developers at the end of the development cycle. Which means, when we're all busy, and everything keeps changing. Because of this, they usually get outsourced to the kind of people who write the manuals, and have little additional information. The game not being released yet, there is little understanding of the problems that real players will encounter. And, of course, not being final the tips in the guide are frequently out-of-date by the time the game actually ships. Did I mention that most of the developers who are supposed to be providing information are too slammed to contribute anything at all?
Similarly, because the original company is involved, you won't see any of the really cool tips that break the game... like how to get over 210% completion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Or shield jumping in Halo. Or those lovely tricks people use in speed runs. Dan's infinite hit combo in Street Fighter Alpha. All of these things are discovered once you get the game in the hands of millions of gamers, and the company responsible for them would never disclose them.
It's too bad the post-ship magazine guide died out. I remember some amazingly thorough guides to Street Fighter II which had more helpful visuals than GameFaqs could provide.
On the one hand, Puzzle Pirates uses the registry to store account information (so that you don't have to re-enter preferences each time). Similarly, it does download and store new assets as needed. And the interplay between the Java runtime and the game is a bit messier than a usual program.
I suspect the real reason it wants full access, though, is that it was developed on Windows in a time before usage restrictions had any meaning on that platform. It predates Vista by a good chunk of time, and you can't say that XP had any meaningful protection.
Great game, though. It's still one of my favorite after all these years.
Nobody is arguing that it isn't a crime. People are just arguing the severity.
Think of what you've done with the past 20 years of your life. Or maybe 20 years of your kid's life. Now think of that being one big, long stint in prison with fraudsters, dealers, and rapists. Does that seem in proportion? That's a full 1/3rd of a life, gone. That's 7,300 days until the weekend. That seems... wrong. That's manslaughter levels of time, for taking a friend's money to change their grade.
We look down upon countries that would cut off a hand for stealing, but we have no qualms about jail sentences that take away huge pieces of people's lives for feel-good political reasons. Selling 20 dollar bags of pot to get by? Massive minimum sentence. The drug money could have been used to fund terrorism, right? Changing grades? They should get 20 years. Someday they might build something that might fall, and look at how many people that could kill.
Since when is importing anything illegal? Or even smarmy?
The Steam platform is powered by trust... People are willing to give Valve complete control over their gaming library because they trust that Valve won't do foolish things. And for the most part they haven't, even going as far as to promise to unlock everyone's games if Steam is deactivated. Allowing people on from other territories, then cutting them off, is a violation of that trust.
Similarly, all single player PC games sell on the goodwill of the customers... it's just trivial to pirate single player games. If Valve isn't careful about ticking off the community, people will find it easier to torrent Portal instead of paying for it. From the sounds of it, this is a small percentage of the overall population of game players. At this level of a problem, it's best to go after your distribution partners than drawing the ire of people who are demonstratably willing to give you money. I make my living with game development, and you just have to be willing to accept that the draconian measures required to prevent 100% of the things you'd like to stop are generally much worse than the things you'd like to stop.
Computers are not region locked. You can pick up any PC game from japan you want or Korean MMO without issue. This, however, is a completely new development.
If I'm not mistaken, the maximum speed wasn't what "copper" could provide, but what could be provided over the Plain Old Telephone System without major reworking. By that time phone systems in the US generally ran on a digital backbone, and the maximum you could compress into a sample was 56k (64k minus a bit for error correction). If I'm not mistaken, there was a trick with synchronizing with the telephone service perfectly that allowed for 128kbps downstream on later modems, but not upstream.
But either way, this wasn't a theoretical limit of copper, but a limitation of trying to send data as a modulated audio signal over our existing phone system.
Respect, in the grand scheme of things, is a red herring. You wear clothes in order to get cultural associations. You wouldn't want a doctor performing surgery wearing a suit, no matter how much "respect" it is supposed to show.
Similarly, showing up to a group of engineers wearing a western suit just shows that you're not an engineer. You're an executive and probably have little or no engineering training. You could also show up to a business meeting as an executive wearing the finest suit from the confuscious dynasty, and you'd never land the deal. If you wore a suit to a party thrown by a group of construction workers it might even be considred an offence. It's all about making cultural associations.
Stallman is in ridiculously high demand as a speaker. By showing up he shows that you're more important than the other dozen of speaking engagements available that day. But even if you're not in demand as a speaker, doing your job and doing it well is really all that is required to show respect. It's curteous to try to look nice (and can be enjoyable too), but it is by no means necessary. Frequently, a suit is just used to cover up for incompentence.
Instead of trying to revitalize the ongoing maintenance costs of an aging fleet, find more valuable / lucrative routes to run, or create value through virtual private jet ownership collectives, he's chasing perhaps 1% of the cost of a ticket while being a PITFA to the customer.
No wonder the airlines are in trouble. I distinctly remember being on a United flight when they charged 5 dollars for food. I happened to be starving, and THEY happened to run out of food by the time they got to me. So now in an attempt to get 5 more dollars out of a 300 dollar ticket, they've really, really annoyed a customer. If I'm going to starve and have an awful time, I'd only pay 200 dollars for a ticket.
Meanwhile, British Airways had a lovely meal, lots of room, and plenty of space to sleep. I'd gladly pay 350 for the same flight on them.
It seems like the carriers are by and large going for razor thin benefits at the cost of pissing off more customers. Do what you do well, and you should be profitable. If you're not, stop stepping on your income stream to chase ghost tenths of a percent.
There is a problem within a lot of companies these days where a misstep can cost you your job, but no steps will lead to promotions. I've heard from reliable sources that Konami of America has been hesitant to make the capital commitment (and risk) that a large hardware launch here would make. The investers didn't "get" it, and the marketing people didn't dare risk their own necks. You'd think that everyone would be chomping at the bit to bring over an entire lineup of games that prints money, but no risk is better than any risk.
Similarly, in any company as big as Konami, regional politics can take an ugly toll. SEGA's infighting of the Japanese Saturn vs the American 32X nearly killed that company. I'm guessing something similar has happened / has been happening at Konami.
Having read up a bit on iPhone unlocking, my impression was that unlocking the iPhone consists of changing a software flag that tells the iPhone to assume it is on a valid network instead of checking. If it is a flag as asserted, then there is no reason why changing said flag should stop the iPhone from working, unless it breaks some new form of validation put into place to stop this type of unlocking.
If you add a spigot to your watertank and it no longer works, that is your fault and the company doesn't have to do anything. If you add a spigot to your watertank and the company sends a representative over with a crowbar to destroy your property, that's illegal. Why should digital be any different?
higher salaries for such amazing results? When, exactly, have these corresponded? One can command a higher salary the more critical the job and the fewer people available to fill it to satisfaction. Any sort of automation or structuring that reduces the specialization broadens the applicant pool and reduces salaries. To build said antenna one would need to have the basics of antenna design and programming, not the decades of experience and volumes of fuzzy knowledge that would otherwise be required.
Don't get me wrong, I totally think this is the right way to go. But don't delude yourself into thinking this will lead to higher slalries in the long run.
Can someone please fill me in on what the top-end calculators are? I've got a ten-year-old TI-92, and that still seems to be more or less TI's top of the line. The Voyage 200 (the TI-92 plus plus) has less than three megabytes of memory on a motorola 68000... a 30 year old chip. The TI-84 is using an even less powerful chip. Even the palm pilot watches cream these things for power, memory, and speed.
These things are archaic relics. Is there nothing that puts up a serious challenge to them?
>>My experience in the industry is such that I know the quality of the education is minimal at best, and it certainly doesn't give you the depth necessary for your skills to be relevant in even 6 months.
Agreed. I've seen developers come from the "best" game schools, only to realize just how little of practical value they actually learned. I'd much rather take a classically trained artist / programmer who had two years of experience in the field than one with a BS and two years at an additional game school.
An artist interested in game development should study 3D design and animation. But more than that, these days they need a broad experience of visuals and techniques to be able to say "Hey, that title would look great as a polaroid transfer. Let's desaturate the scene and add a global bump map to simulate a handmade paper." A programmer that knows 9 different ways to get anything done is going to be more useful than one who remembers what their professors at CMU taught them was the one best way to do specific tricks which will be outdated in a year anyway. And don't get me started on designers (of which, mysteriously, I am one).
So yes, if you want to work in video games, get as broad of an education as possible. Learn about how people interact with everyday objects. How political systems work in third world countries. Learn the programming languages used in punch card systems. Study how bacteria invade the surface of fruit. Or how light bends around large objects. Or the techniques 16th century painters used to draw interest to the face of the subject of a portrait. Of course, if you hope to specialize, do study that too. But it is a lot easier to take a great artist and teach them the tools than it is to take a crappy but technically proficient artist and make them great. And these game schools seem to be churning out crappy but technically proficient people.
Slashdot Mirror
Then what is going to the honeypots?
Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one 'mass communications officer' by name, who has since received death threats for 'simply doing his job posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.
Yeah. And I wish these people would get off my back about my job: processing street children into delicious meat pies.
What have these liberal bastards got against meat pies?
People often forget that Anarchy within months breaks down into feudal warlordship. I.E. if you oust a government, another one will rise very, very quickly.
In other words, you can shatter the current system, but you can't shatter the global truth that money leads to power. Generally, a ruling system has to be more built up to separate the two, rather than less.
This reminds me of how one can send child porn unsolicited to congressmen, and the recipient is liable for steep legal penalties. In this particular case, how would Berman react if he were sent a dozen MP3's only to have his computer seized?
Sometimes I wish congresspeople would think about the consequences of their legislation before they make them. Sometimes I wish people would show them.
Apple:
1. Apple creates proprietary iTunes schema, as none such existed in the market. Sticks with it for ten years. Starts to transition to universal MP3's.
Microsoft:
1. Microsoft creates proprietary PlaysForSure schema in response to apple. Partners with lots of companies to push as an proprietary but licenceable standard. Sells PlaysForSure tracks on MSN.com.
2. Microsoft abandons PlaysForSure, destroying the standard. Microsoft instead sells the Zune, with zune-specific music tracks.
3. Microsoft sticks PlaysForSure and Zune DRM together as "Certified for Vista." Except that things which are all "Certified for Vista" will play with Vista, but won't actually play with eachother. And it will play with non-Vista things. Right.
So the music player with an estimated 2% of the market is paired with an OS that has 6%. Good luck with that!
Why is it suddenly technology becomes the big evil because it can be used for bad things? Inserting system-related warnings into the HTTP stream seems totally reasonable, although I'd rather they'd replace whole pages rather than insert.
But that doesn't mean the technology is evil any more than the perl which powers the engine is evil.
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time.... mainly because of one time-consuming thing: building up the user base.
Actually, as a game developer, I'm going with A: tens of thousands of hours of content to churn, B: a multi-server technological platform infrastructure which is both synchronized and massively parallel across disparate random hardware, C: character separation via deep customization and minimum 5 - 8 primary paths, and D: intricate system interactions frequently orders of magnitude deeper than traditional RPG's. This is why almost all MMORPG's out there take 5 years to get to Beta, with development teams in the hundreds.
Many MMO's build up a sustainable userbase in a couple of years. WoW broke in about a month. Guild Wars... maybe 5 months. Puzzle Pirates seemed to take about two years. But however much a daunting task it is to get a population there, the actual building of any MMO is an insane PITFA. I'd guesstimate MMOs require about 4 - 5 times the team size and development time of a normal game.
Why would real researchers need more images of the lunar surface? Visual images aren't what's really used for creating detailed maps, and images of that region of the moon have existed for years anyway.
I think his point is that while 200$ per child + ongoing upkeep may be "giving" a library of books by our standards, it doesn't meet the needs of a population in a region dominated by subsistence scavaging and unemployment.
And in some ways I'd have to agree. There is this strangely pervasive belief that if these people were only better educated, they'd miraculously pop out of poverty. There always feels like a twinge of latent racism in the "educate these people and they'll be fine" argument. This ignores many other important factors like available capital for new businesses, unfavorable political climates, a lack of inherent natural resources, exploding birthrates, poor sanitation and health, etc. All of which are important to creating a thriving population.
On the other hand, if you need sanitation improved through mass construction of lavatories, the Silicon Valley is not the place to go. OLPC is the right contribution that particular people can make to improving the lives of third-world students. It doesn't meet their immediate needs in any shape or form, but hopefully it will contribute to their ability to understand their local political climate, facilitate launching of businesses, etc.
P.S., if you want to make a lasting change without the OLPC, try loaning money at Kiva. Help a 3rd world business meet regional needs without unsustainable handouts.
Can someone quickly update us on the state of getting Koffice running on Windows? I vaguely remember it was KDE 3.5 that was supposed to precipitate the QT switcheroo which would facilitate compatibility.
I miss KMail, like the desert misses the rain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density
United States ranks somewhere between Zambabwe and Estonia by population per square kilometer. France has about 10x the US average population density.
In other words, It will now have to pay its fair share of taxes, same as other businesses.
Except other labor-only services pay no such tax. Specifically, any maintenence services (as opposed to fabrication of new items) are not taxed. From the Maryland tax code web page:
On the other hand, charges for repairing or restoring an existing item of tangible personal property to its original condition are not subject to tax. A charge for reconfiguring or enhancing existing tangible personal property, unless it results in the creation of a new and different item of tangible personal property, is also not taxable.
Essentially, IT is being singled out for paying taxes whereas other labor types do not. There is no tax on having your accounting done, but now there is a tax on having your accounting software debugged. There isn't a tax on having your car fixed, but there is a tax on having your servers fixed. There is no tax on having your nails done, or having your lawn mowed, or having your house painted. Why are technology services being singled out in this respect?
Isn't it great how with one little change of definition, "privacy" can now mean "we keep private everything we know about you, which is everything."
This guy really should be fired. Out of a cannon. At a wall.
Guides are frequently written by developers at the end of the development cycle. Which means, when we're all busy, and everything keeps changing. Because of this, they usually get outsourced to the kind of people who write the manuals, and have little additional information. The game not being released yet, there is little understanding of the problems that real players will encounter. And, of course, not being final the tips in the guide are frequently out-of-date by the time the game actually ships. Did I mention that most of the developers who are supposed to be providing information are too slammed to contribute anything at all?
Similarly, because the original company is involved, you won't see any of the really cool tips that break the game... like how to get over 210% completion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Or shield jumping in Halo. Or those lovely tricks people use in speed runs. Dan's infinite hit combo in Street Fighter Alpha. All of these things are discovered once you get the game in the hands of millions of gamers, and the company responsible for them would never disclose them.
It's too bad the post-ship magazine guide died out. I remember some amazingly thorough guides to Street Fighter II which had more helpful visuals than GameFaqs could provide.
On the one hand, Puzzle Pirates uses the registry to store account information (so that you don't have to re-enter preferences each time). Similarly, it does download and store new assets as needed. And the interplay between the Java runtime and the game is a bit messier than a usual program.
I suspect the real reason it wants full access, though, is that it was developed on Windows in a time before usage restrictions had any meaning on that platform. It predates Vista by a good chunk of time, and you can't say that XP had any meaningful protection.
Great game, though. It's still one of my favorite after all these years.
Nobody is arguing that it isn't a crime. People are just arguing the severity.
Think of what you've done with the past 20 years of your life. Or maybe 20 years of your kid's life. Now think of that being one big, long stint in prison with fraudsters, dealers, and rapists. Does that seem in proportion? That's a full 1/3rd of a life, gone. That's 7,300 days until the weekend. That seems... wrong. That's manslaughter levels of time, for taking a friend's money to change their grade.
We look down upon countries that would cut off a hand for stealing, but we have no qualms about jail sentences that take away huge pieces of people's lives for feel-good political reasons. Selling 20 dollar bags of pot to get by? Massive minimum sentence. The drug money could have been used to fund terrorism, right? Changing grades? They should get 20 years. Someday they might build something that might fall, and look at how many people that could kill.
Let's keep things in proportion, shall we?
Since when is importing anything illegal? Or even smarmy?
The Steam platform is powered by trust... People are willing to give Valve complete control over their gaming library because they trust that Valve won't do foolish things. And for the most part they haven't, even going as far as to promise to unlock everyone's games if Steam is deactivated. Allowing people on from other territories, then cutting them off, is a violation of that trust.
Similarly, all single player PC games sell on the goodwill of the customers... it's just trivial to pirate single player games. If Valve isn't careful about ticking off the community, people will find it easier to torrent Portal instead of paying for it. From the sounds of it, this is a small percentage of the overall population of game players. At this level of a problem, it's best to go after your distribution partners than drawing the ire of people who are demonstratably willing to give you money. I make my living with game development, and you just have to be willing to accept that the draconian measures required to prevent 100% of the things you'd like to stop are generally much worse than the things you'd like to stop.
Computers are not region locked. You can pick up any PC game from japan you want or Korean MMO without issue. This, however, is a completely new development.
If I'm not mistaken, the maximum speed wasn't what "copper" could provide, but what could be provided over the Plain Old Telephone System without major reworking. By that time phone systems in the US generally ran on a digital backbone, and the maximum you could compress into a sample was 56k (64k minus a bit for error correction). If I'm not mistaken, there was a trick with synchronizing with the telephone service perfectly that allowed for 128kbps downstream on later modems, but not upstream.
But either way, this wasn't a theoretical limit of copper, but a limitation of trying to send data as a modulated audio signal over our existing phone system.
Respect, in the grand scheme of things, is a red herring. You wear clothes in order to get cultural associations. You wouldn't want a doctor performing surgery wearing a suit, no matter how much "respect" it is supposed to show.
Similarly, showing up to a group of engineers wearing a western suit just shows that you're not an engineer. You're an executive and probably have little or no engineering training. You could also show up to a business meeting as an executive wearing the finest suit from the confuscious dynasty, and you'd never land the deal. If you wore a suit to a party thrown by a group of construction workers it might even be considred an offence. It's all about making cultural associations.
Stallman is in ridiculously high demand as a speaker. By showing up he shows that you're more important than the other dozen of speaking engagements available that day. But even if you're not in demand as a speaker, doing your job and doing it well is really all that is required to show respect. It's curteous to try to look nice (and can be enjoyable too), but it is by no means necessary. Frequently, a suit is just used to cover up for incompentence.
Instead of trying to revitalize the ongoing maintenance costs of an aging fleet, find more valuable / lucrative routes to run, or create value through virtual private jet ownership collectives, he's chasing perhaps 1% of the cost of a ticket while being a PITFA to the customer.
No wonder the airlines are in trouble. I distinctly remember being on a United flight when they charged 5 dollars for food. I happened to be starving, and THEY happened to run out of food by the time they got to me. So now in an attempt to get 5 more dollars out of a 300 dollar ticket, they've really, really annoyed a customer. If I'm going to starve and have an awful time, I'd only pay 200 dollars for a ticket.
Meanwhile, British Airways had a lovely meal, lots of room, and plenty of space to sleep. I'd gladly pay 350 for the same flight on them.
It seems like the carriers are by and large going for razor thin benefits at the cost of pissing off more customers. Do what you do well, and you should be profitable. If you're not, stop stepping on your income stream to chase ghost tenths of a percent.
There is a problem within a lot of companies these days where a misstep can cost you your job, but no steps will lead to promotions. I've heard from reliable sources that Konami of America has been hesitant to make the capital commitment (and risk) that a large hardware launch here would make. The investers didn't "get" it, and the marketing people didn't dare risk their own necks. You'd think that everyone would be chomping at the bit to bring over an entire lineup of games that prints money, but no risk is better than any risk.
Similarly, in any company as big as Konami, regional politics can take an ugly toll. SEGA's infighting of the Japanese Saturn vs the American 32X nearly killed that company. I'm guessing something similar has happened / has been happening at Konami.
Having read up a bit on iPhone unlocking, my impression was that unlocking the iPhone consists of changing a software flag that tells the iPhone to assume it is on a valid network instead of checking. If it is a flag as asserted, then there is no reason why changing said flag should stop the iPhone from working, unless it breaks some new form of validation put into place to stop this type of unlocking.
If you add a spigot to your watertank and it no longer works, that is your fault and the company doesn't have to do anything. If you add a spigot to your watertank and the company sends a representative over with a crowbar to destroy your property, that's illegal. Why should digital be any different?
higher salaries for such amazing results? When, exactly, have these corresponded? One can command a higher salary the more critical the job and the fewer people available to fill it to satisfaction. Any sort of automation or structuring that reduces the specialization broadens the applicant pool and reduces salaries. To build said antenna one would need to have the basics of antenna design and programming, not the decades of experience and volumes of fuzzy knowledge that would otherwise be required.
Don't get me wrong, I totally think this is the right way to go. But don't delude yourself into thinking this will lead to higher slalries in the long run.
Can someone please fill me in on what the top-end calculators are? I've got a ten-year-old TI-92, and that still seems to be more or less TI's top of the line. The Voyage 200 (the TI-92 plus plus) has less than three megabytes of memory on a motorola 68000... a 30 year old chip. The TI-84 is using an even less powerful chip. Even the palm pilot watches cream these things for power, memory, and speed.
These things are archaic relics. Is there nothing that puts up a serious challenge to them?
>>My experience in the industry is such that I know the quality of the education is minimal at best, and it certainly doesn't give you the depth necessary for your skills to be relevant in even 6 months.
Agreed. I've seen developers come from the "best" game schools, only to realize just how little of practical value they actually learned. I'd much rather take a classically trained artist / programmer who had two years of experience in the field than one with a BS and two years at an additional game school.
An artist interested in game development should study 3D design and animation. But more than that, these days they need a broad experience of visuals and techniques to be able to say "Hey, that title would look great as a polaroid transfer. Let's desaturate the scene and add a global bump map to simulate a handmade paper." A programmer that knows 9 different ways to get anything done is going to be more useful than one who remembers what their professors at CMU taught them was the one best way to do specific tricks which will be outdated in a year anyway. And don't get me started on designers (of which, mysteriously, I am one).
So yes, if you want to work in video games, get as broad of an education as possible. Learn about how people interact with everyday objects. How political systems work in third world countries. Learn the programming languages used in punch card systems. Study how bacteria invade the surface of fruit. Or how light bends around large objects. Or the techniques 16th century painters used to draw interest to the face of the subject of a portrait. Of course, if you hope to specialize, do study that too. But it is a lot easier to take a great artist and teach them the tools than it is to take a crappy but technically proficient artist and make them great. And these game schools seem to be churning out crappy but technically proficient people.