For remakes of sierra games you can check out Tierra at: http://www.qknowledge.net/royalquest/ They already remade the Kings Quest 1 to look like Kings Quest 5:) Now they are working on KQ2 and QFG2. I already finished KQ1 again:)
But why was it wrong? All the statements you quoted say "if this continues like it is now then we will be in problems". It did not continue like that BECAUSE there are people who say it!
Again this prediction hopefully will have as effect that people start to think and try to avoid it! If other people start to think like you then the next prediction might become true and the world might end.
As a non-chinese writing from China I tend to agree on the first part. Yes... most of the/. writers/readers seem to have a wrong impression of the situation in China. As the same.. most people in China have a wrong impression of US and Europe.
But I don't know who told you that most people support their govermet *strongly*? Thats total crap. Most people will say this or mention that the goverment is making good progress (they are!). But they are not supporting the goverment *strongly*. Having a few beers or local alcohol will bring much frustration towards the goverment. Most people do not support the goverment... but tend to think that it slowly gets better.
> In China you can pay 80 Yuan ($10) monthly fee to have a dial-up account, which is affordable for most Chinese. A majority of the netizen in China can surf on Internet right from their home.
80 RMB per month? I do not know where you are or how you got it but in all Chinese cities the dial-up account is for free and you just pay per minute. (for phone and for inet access). For 80 Yuan per month I can actually get a VDSL connection to my home which beats most western countries.
>But the Indians and Chinese are getting better >and better at outsourced work. There's a huge >information/cultural/communication gap now but >don't think that will stand in the way 20 years >from now.
Uhm yes... but as I'm working in China and know many Indian programmers... I can tell you that not only their skill is improving but also their salery is improving. If this continues then a Chinese or Indian programmer will cost the same as an European or American programmer. So what is the reason then to still outsource it out of Europe/US?
Will you then tell me that the Africans are getting better and better and we should outsource to them?
IMHO outsourcing software is VERY difficult much more difficult than outsourcing hardware.
Programming will be still alive in 100 years and will only get more important.
I DO think this article is mainly talking about the embedded software market and not about the programmer job in general.
As I'm working as embedded software developer I can agree agree with the article that there are few 'older' people working on embedded software (there still are!). But I do believe there is also a big technical reason for the this. The embedded software market has changed very very rapidly. A few years ago you still had to write everything (realtime OS + software) but these days also the hardware for embedded software is increasing quickly. Many embedded systems run quite advanced OSes (or its even common to choose freeBSD based or Linux for embedded systems) which changed the work of the embedded programmers. Embedded programming is more and more like normal desktop programming with the main difference that you will probably not build your image/executable on the same machine as it runs. I believe that for many old embedded developers (who originally came from hardware centric education) this change is very difficult and many choose to not go with this change!
I do not believe in the money point of view and agree with the statements made earlier that in bog companies an 'senior engineer' in a team will often make more money than his manager for the simple reason that its often more easy to replace the management than to replace the technical staff.
As I'm currently living in China I'd like to comment on this. As was pointed out a few times allready (and therefor redundant) the decision of the Chinese goverment is not about Microsoft. Its about nationalism. China is always pushing the local economy and therefore all the foreign countries need to suffer. Even if Microsoft would give away their software and it would have been far better than any local then the Beijing goverment would still chose the local companies.
This is (very unfortunatly) true for every industry in China. The foreign companies will always have to pay more tax so that the local product will be more cheap. An foreign apple will cost about 20 times a local apple! Even when joining the WTO this will probably not change much since in China (like US) the goverment tries to control everything.
Also the foreign companies work around this by starting joint ventures. This means that 49% of the foreign company in china will be owned by a local chinese company (which has a CEO which has good relations with the goverment) and 51% will be the foreign company. The sales go to the foreign company (just a little), the goverment (a lot of tax) and for 49% in the pocket of the director of the local company. Thats how it really works in China... true capitalism..even worse than the US.
So now also the decision is made to push the domestic economy and probably a few party members:)
China economy is very similar with the US. Very corrupt.
Having worked on internationalisation in some compagnies and now working in China, the unicode standard turned out to be a very good thing.
First of all it might not be perfect but it works very well. It is a lot more easy to have one table instead of different encodings which there used to be. It makes life as a software developer a LOT easier. Companies can easily tell their developers to write in unicode in ascii (C wchar_t works fine) and if they ever want to write a multilanguage version then it is SO much easier. This will improve the number of translated applications in the future.
Second. Unicode is allready being used majorly. Every new OS out these days uses unicode internally. Win2k and symbian epoc are good examples. The last is also the reason why all mobile phones work perfectly with Chinese characters. The IETF also works on standardisation of foreign characters in DNS names and also uses unicode for that. (Note.. does not restrict to unicode.) As mentioned in http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf- idn-requirements-07.txt
Conslusion
Thanks to the unicode standard for making the life of a software developer a LOT easier!
Slashdot Mirror
For remakes of sierra games you can check out Tierra at: http://www.qknowledge.net/royalquest/ :) Now they are working on KQ2 and QFG2. I already finished KQ1 again :)
They already remade the Kings Quest 1 to look like Kings Quest 5
Good initiative!
But why was it wrong? All the statements you quoted say "if this continues like it is now then we will be in problems". It did not continue like that BECAUSE there are people who say it!
Again this prediction hopefully will have as effect that people start to think and try to avoid it! If other people start to think like you then the next prediction might become true and the world might end.
Better change it soon.
As a non-chinese writing from China I tend to agree on the first part. Yes... most of the /. writers/readers seem to have a wrong impression of the situation in China. As the same .. most people in China have a wrong impression of US and Europe.
But I don't know who told you that most people support their govermet *strongly*? Thats total crap. Most people will say this or mention that the goverment is making good progress (they are!). But they are not supporting the goverment *strongly*. Having a few beers or local alcohol will bring much frustration towards the goverment. Most people do not support the goverment... but tend to think that it slowly gets better.
> In China you can pay 80 Yuan ($10) monthly fee to have a dial-up account, which is affordable for most Chinese. A majority of the netizen in China can surf on Internet right from their home.
80 RMB per month? I do not know where you are or how you got it but in all Chinese cities the dial-up account is for free and you just pay per minute. (for phone and for inet access). For 80 Yuan per month I can actually get a VDSL connection to my home which beats most western countries.
>But the Indians and Chinese are getting better >and better at outsourced work. There's a huge >information/cultural/communication gap now but >don't think that will stand in the way 20 years >from now.
Uhm yes... but as I'm working in China and know many Indian programmers... I can tell you that not only their skill is improving but also their salery is improving. If this continues then a Chinese or Indian programmer will cost the same as an European or American programmer. So what is the reason then to still outsource it out of Europe/US?
Will you then tell me that the Africans are getting better and better and we should outsource to them?
IMHO outsourcing software is VERY difficult much more difficult than outsourcing hardware.
Programming will be still alive in 100 years and will only get more important.
I DO think this article is mainly talking about the embedded software market and not about the programmer job in general.
As I'm working as embedded software developer I can agree agree with the article that there are few 'older' people working on embedded software (there still are!). But I do believe there is also a big technical reason for the this. The embedded software market has changed very very rapidly. A few years ago you still had to write everything (realtime OS + software) but these days also the hardware for embedded software is increasing quickly. Many embedded systems run quite advanced OSes (or its even common to choose freeBSD based or Linux for embedded systems) which changed the work of the embedded programmers. Embedded programming is more and more like normal desktop programming with the main difference that you will probably not build your image/executable on the same machine as it runs. I believe that for many old embedded developers (who originally came from hardware centric education) this change is very difficult and many choose to not go with this change!
I do not believe in the money point of view and agree with the statements made earlier that in bog companies an 'senior engineer' in a team will often make more money than his manager for the simple reason that its often more easy to replace the management than to replace the technical staff.
Hi,
:)
As I'm currently living in China I'd like to comment on this. As was pointed out a few times allready (and therefor redundant) the decision of the Chinese goverment is not about Microsoft. Its about nationalism. China is always pushing the local economy and therefore all the foreign countries need to suffer. Even if Microsoft would give away their software and it would have been far better than any local then the Beijing goverment would still chose the local companies.
This is (very unfortunatly) true for every industry in China. The foreign companies will always have to pay more tax so that the local product will be more cheap. An foreign apple will cost about 20 times a local apple! Even when joining the WTO this will probably not change much since in China (like US) the goverment tries to control everything.
Also the foreign companies work around this by starting joint ventures. This means that 49% of the foreign company in china will be owned by a local chinese company (which has a CEO which has good relations with the goverment) and 51% will be the foreign company. The sales go to the foreign company (just a little), the goverment (a lot of tax) and for 49% in the pocket of the director of the local company. Thats how it really works in China... true capitalism..even worse than the US.
So now also the decision is made to push the domestic economy and probably a few party members
China economy is very similar with the US. Very corrupt.
Having worked on internationalisation in some compagnies and now working in China, the unicode standard turned out to be a very good thing. First of all it might not be perfect but it works very well. It is a lot more easy to have one table instead of different encodings which there used to be. It makes life as a software developer a LOT easier. Companies can easily tell their developers to write in unicode in ascii (C wchar_t works fine) and if they ever want to write a multilanguage version then it is SO much easier. This will improve the number of translated applications in the future. Second. Unicode is allready being used majorly. Every new OS out these days uses unicode internally. Win2k and symbian epoc are good examples. The last is also the reason why all mobile phones work perfectly with Chinese characters. The IETF also works on standardisation of foreign characters in DNS names and also uses unicode for that. (Note.. does not restrict to unicode.) As mentioned in http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf- idn-requirements-07.txt
Conslusion
Thanks to the unicode standard for making the life of a software developer a LOT easier!