Given how the computing-industry has suffered economically recently; will there still be a demand for programmers/game designers in the future?
There is still a growing demand for games. Successful computer games these days gross much more than films do - it's an incredibly lucrative market if you get the right product. Of course, many fail, but the ones that succeed do so hugely. As a computer science student at Cambridge University, I must say that there's quite a lot of stuff in the course which is directly applicable to game development; particularly AI, 3D graphics, general algorithms and data structures.
Learning how to be a good game developer is much like any other programming discipline - it's not about how to code the surface stuff (like being able to use Direct3D properly), it's far more about how to code the stuff which is hidden from the user. AI and suchlike is difficult to get right, and having some formal training helps you to attack the kind of problems you come up with. Anyone can throw a bunch of polygons up onto the screen using OpenGL/D3D - it's a trivial operation. The skill is in writing well-scaling code for handling the game world. This is hard, and given the increasing complexities and demands of modern games, formal training is only becoming more useful IMHO. Proper software engineering principles are becoming extremely important - the days when you could knock out a best-seller in your back room are over; most new releases are developed by teams of at least ten people over the course of several years. Of course, this is a very expensive business, which is why the number of game development companies and (in particular) publishing houses has decreased recently.
Games are also losing their geeky image and becoming more mainstream. There is also the theory that once people start playing games, they tend to do so for life. Most young people tend to and the older generation of people who don't play games is dying out, so again the market is expanding.
Game consoles will also effectively drop in price as console/satellite/cable/video/tivo/dvd/cd players in the living room get replaced by one box. This should (yet again) increase the size of the market, making it even more lucrative.
Once you get a foot in the door of the industry, it's relatively easy to climb up the ladder due to the smallish size of most companies and the very flat management structures that tend to be in place. If you want to do artwork, a good portfolio is apparently a must. Otherwise, an ability to solve problems (as always:)) and creatively program around things. That and some luck. If you want to start up your own company, it's quite hard to do unless you can find someone who's already made it in some way (previous success at some game or other).
Zeus Load Balancer is an excellent product. It scales hugely well, has excellent backup and works transparently across practically any TCP/IP protocol (be it www, smtp, nntp, or whatever). I've heard nothing but good things. It can also handle distributed SSL processing. Very cool and easy to admin product.
Check out the AT&T coffee machine. This has been upgraded over the years, and now talks to some listening daeomon process via a serial line. The daemon has a CORBA interface, and... oh, just go read the link;-).
The stats are currently rather old - I'm not sure if the whole thing's still functional.
He *did* mean multiuser. There are quite nasty issues involved with getting SMP systems to run both user and kernel code on multiple processors. It's non-trivial. Go read some of Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum for a good explanation - it's much too complicated for me to summarise concisely in a/. post.
I've discovered this is an excellent way of wasting large amounts of time - reasonably correct syntax/semantics in English and strict correctness in PHP makes for more of a challenge than most menial PHP tasks. I should be writing C++ code for my finals... grr...
Contributory copyright infringement: This can't be easily justified; Apple must prove that the primary purpose of the software is to infringe copyright. Napster tried to argue that most of its users were law-abiding citizens who swapped only public domain MP3s, when this blatantly wasn't true. However, in this case, most of the users are just creating their own themes. The fact that the theme editor makes it possible to copy some of Apple's graphics is incidental - it's not the main use for the software, and it's not what the majority of users will do with it. I don't think Apple would win this one in court (but then, they can probably afford much better lawyers).
Reverse engineering of MacOS: This one's a bit stickier. Apple never released the specs in public to do what Macthemes does. Therefore the authors must have reverse-engineered MacOS, claim Apple. However, go read the macthemes.org statement about the prior case some while back with Sega about this kind of thing. A couple of points are important: There is no reverse-engineered code in Macthemes. They just derived the specs for the themes and use those. Also, they're not making a profit from the knowledge, so the use can be deemed experimental or educational. It could be argued that they are detracting from the MacOS UI consistency/feel/whatever, which is a big selling point. But on the other hand they are arguably adding to the user experience. I think you'd find it hard to convince a court that they were actually harming the product's image or causing loss of earnings.
So, to summarise, Apple don't seem to have much to stand on, and it looks to me like they're trying to intimidate the little guy. In common with the rest of the people here, I can't see why.
>These scripting languages can be learned in a day or two.
Hmmm... I think you'd be hard pressed to find a serious Perl hacker who thinks it can be "learned in a day or two".
That's all very well provided you run identical hardware everywhere. I've found Linux to be much easier to set up networks for, as it's simple to create a custom setup disk (RedHat kickstart or whatever) which installs what you want on the OS, and then write a BASH script to copy all the relevant files off a server, set up LaTeX, NIS, etc., etc. It's very hard to install Windows programs with zero-intervention. It's also a lot more difficult to upgrade apps, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
There is still a growing demand for games. Successful computer games these days gross much more than films do - it's an incredibly lucrative market if you get the right product. Of course, many fail, but the ones that succeed do so hugely. As a computer science student at Cambridge University, I must say that there's quite a lot of stuff in the course which is directly applicable to game development; particularly AI, 3D graphics, general algorithms and data structures.
Learning how to be a good game developer is much like any other programming discipline - it's not about how to code the surface stuff (like being able to use Direct3D properly), it's far more about how to code the stuff which is hidden from the user. AI and suchlike is difficult to get right, and having some formal training helps you to attack the kind of problems you come up with. Anyone can throw a bunch of polygons up onto the screen using OpenGL/D3D - it's a trivial operation. The skill is in writing well-scaling code for handling the game world. This is hard, and given the increasing complexities and demands of modern games, formal training is only becoming more useful IMHO. Proper software engineering principles are becoming extremely important - the days when you could knock out a best-seller in your back room are over; most new releases are developed by teams of at least ten people over the course of several years. Of course, this is a very expensive business, which is why the number of game development companies and (in particular) publishing houses has decreased recently.
Games are also losing their geeky image and becoming more mainstream. There is also the theory that once people start playing games, they tend to do so for life. Most young people tend to and the older generation of people who don't play games is dying out, so again the market is expanding.
Game consoles will also effectively drop in price as console/satellite/cable/video/tivo/dvd/cd players in the living room get replaced by one box. This should (yet again) increase the size of the market, making it even more lucrative.
Once you get a foot in the door of the industry, it's relatively easy to climb up the ladder due to the smallish size of most companies and the very flat management structures that tend to be in place. If you want to do artwork, a good portfolio is apparently a must. Otherwise, an ability to solve problems (as always :)) and creatively program around things. That and some luck. If you want to start up your own company, it's quite hard to do unless you can find someone who's already made it in some way (previous success at some game or other).
Zeus Load Balancer is an excellent product. It scales hugely well, has excellent backup and works transparently across practically any TCP/IP protocol (be it www, smtp, nntp, or whatever). I've heard nothing but good things. It can also handle distributed SSL processing. Very cool and easy to admin product.
Check out the AT&T coffee machine. This has been upgraded over the years, and now talks to some listening daeomon process via a serial line. The daemon has a CORBA interface, and... oh, just go read the link ;-).
The stats are currently rather old - I'm not sure if the whole thing's still functional.
He *did* mean multiuser. There are quite nasty issues involved with getting SMP systems to run both user and kernel code on multiple processors. It's non-trivial. Go read some of Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum for a good explanation - it's much too complicated for me to summarise concisely in a /. post.
I've discovered this is an excellent way of wasting large amounts of time - reasonably correct syntax/semantics in English and strict correctness in PHP makes for more of a challenge than most menial PHP tasks. I should be writing C++ code for my finals... grr...
- Contributory copyright infringement: This can't be easily justified; Apple must prove that the primary purpose of the software is to infringe copyright. Napster tried to argue that most of its users were law-abiding citizens who swapped only public domain MP3s, when this blatantly wasn't true. However, in this case, most of the users are just creating their own themes. The fact that the theme editor makes it possible to copy some of Apple's graphics is incidental - it's not the main use for the software, and it's not what the majority of users will do with it. I don't think Apple would win this one in court (but then, they can probably afford much better lawyers).
- Reverse engineering of MacOS: This one's a bit stickier. Apple never released the specs in public to do what Macthemes does. Therefore the authors must have reverse-engineered MacOS, claim Apple. However, go read the macthemes.org statement about the prior case some while back with Sega about this kind of thing. A couple of points are important: There is no reverse-engineered code in Macthemes. They just derived the specs for the themes and use those. Also, they're not making a profit from the knowledge, so the use can be deemed experimental or educational. It could be argued that they are detracting from the MacOS UI consistency/feel/whatever, which is a big selling point. But on the other hand they are arguably adding to the user experience. I think you'd find it hard to convince a court that they were actually harming the product's image or causing loss of earnings.
So, to summarise, Apple don't seem to have much to stand on, and it looks to me like they're trying to intimidate the little guy. In common with the rest of the people here, I can't see why.>These scripting languages can be learned in a day or two. Hmmm... I think you'd be hard pressed to find a serious Perl hacker who thinks it can be "learned in a day or two".
That's all very well provided you run identical hardware everywhere. I've found Linux to be much easier to set up networks for, as it's simple to create a custom setup disk (RedHat kickstart or whatever) which installs what you want on the OS, and then write a BASH script to copy all the relevant files off a server, set up LaTeX, NIS, etc., etc. It's very hard to install Windows programs with zero-intervention. It's also a lot more difficult to upgrade apps, etc.