As is site is aptly named - Irony Central - The irony is hes an RPG writer who happens to make a decent living off RPGs, and can write off every game he plays as research.
Seeing what he wrote though, I'm more curious what his next game is going to look like.
As he wrote about starting you off as a loser, thats exactly how his games start you as well.
College is quite useful in most fields. Research in CS as you stated is one.
And the PhDs, they should be doing something more useful. But they applied, and we hired them.
I've heard all my life from those around me the importance of college, and how much it will change your career. Most professions I agree it will, but programming most of the time simply isn't one of them.
A GUI? A client/server application? A CGI? A portal system? A shopping cart? MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase, MSSQL, SQLite?
Most of whats designed online schools haven't caught up with yet, unless you count countries like India, where IT companies are actually creating their own colleges and teaching what they use, and not theory.
Google is research, and having a PhD there you can apply it and go wild. But for every one Google there are a hundred other companies that just want someone to maintain a shopping cart. The pay may not be as good, but it can still pay pretty well. And often times for those people who have the advanced degrees its probably boring work.
One could argue the company doesn't take advantage of them, or that we don't manage them properly. Reality is we don't have huge tasks that require complex solutions. And we made this very clear when we hired them. They decided to stay. I'm guessing that they probably are bored to death. They do have the option to leave though. But the work isn't going to get any more advanced then what it is.
I guess back to what I failed at being a point -
If your going to goto college for CS, and spend the time to learn more - Where can you apply it? Most of the jobs out there, aside from those rare Google cases, just don't need those types of people. For every 1 Picasso you need 5 people to just do the work. And odds are most people are just one of those 5.
And yes, I do partially suffer from that "I turned out OK". This is based on my own experiences in the companies I've worked for, and specific to the field.
I have no degree. In fact I'm a high-school dropout (though I got the GED).
I'm a manager at my current company. I've had up to 12 people reporting to me.
Of those 12, 2 I count as Sr. people, and neither has ever gone to college. And by Sr. I mean I can leave them alone and they just know what they are doing. The type you say "Give me a widget" and they'll go design what your thinking almost spot-on perfect.
I have had 3 people who have PhD's, they are all Jr. programmers who I'd say really are not that worth it. One that no longer works here I had to explain over and over and over again how to do simple things. "Its a while loop.. WHILE.. You loop over things.. You know, loops?"
I know there are large companies that "require" degrees, however I also know a lot of people who work for said companies and are utterly bored to death. I work for a medium sized company that says "Degree or equivalent experience". Working here I've written in C, perl, Lua, Java. I've written threaded to multiplexing to client/server to fancy GUI programs. Been an admin, a networking engineer, a programmer, now the managers hat. I have a world of freedom.
In my experience smaller to mid-sized companies are the most interesting.
I have a few friends who work for some larger companies. Very few are given real freedom, especially in comparison to how much I have. They tend to get stuck being one of X-thousand programmers, always working on the same thing, just a new revision.
So do you want a degree that a larger company may want, but you'll probably be bored to death?
Or a small to mid-sized company that probably doesn't require one and gives you more diverse assignments and keeps you interested?
Oh yeah, and my opinion as a hiring manager, we don't give much credit to degrees. I've yet to see one that actually teaches anything we use in the real world. I'm sure its great for example with Google which does so much advanced mathematics work, but your not going to find that at most places.
This is of course just one managers opinion, your millage will vary. Though its an opinion at least shared by many other execs I've talked to.
While others have said Wing Commander, it wasn't itself driven to the ground as more or less abandoned. Ultima however I'd qualify as driven to the ground in its last release.
Fallout
So many games after Fallout 2 claiming the "Fallout" name that basically drove to the ground. The only hope is that Fallout 3 (now being worked on) can reclaim some of what it was.
Other ones that I consider more "abandoned" the driven to the ground -
Wizardry
Mentioned already, but the last game was still a pretty good game. It wasn't driven as much as left alone.
Most of the Bullfrog IP Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Populous
Abandoned when purchased.
For that matter, doesn't it seem like most of the good PC games were killed off by EA?
Every month I average the purchase of 1 PS2 game and 2-3 PC games.
I also enjoy getting out, have the girlfriend, and don't spend all my time inside. Which also means I haven't actually played all the games I own, but I'm still a collector.
Oh yeah, and I own a PSP, DS Lite, X-Box (only found 2 games I liked on it - Strategy and RPG is my taste).
And yes, that means if I'll buy a system just to play two games, you can bet I'll be getting a PS3. And I'll probably get a 360 when Mass Effect comes out.
A lot of my friends aren't as "hard core" as they used to be, due to various reasons (family, other interests, time, etc). Me still being the hard-core one they always know who to turn to when they feel the urge to dive into gaming for a night.
Back in the day on the school yard, we used to beatup all the AOLers. "My daddy just got me AOL, look everyone!" Yeah, we'd pelt him with a few dozen free AOL CDs.
You could always spot the AOLers, with that vacent look in thier eyes, the look of the newly assimilated.
Now a days AOLers are getting more advanced, they are able to creep up on you. You don't know till its to late. "Come, see my computer". "No, wait! - Why, what have I ever done to you?!"
Now they have these fobs. I can see it now. Someday I'll return to the old school yard, and one of my friends will spot the fob. I'll profess how its not for AOL, its for work. They won't believe me. I'll be pelted with CDs. Branded a traitor. They'll find out that I've had an AIM address for years. I'll be denied entry to the clubs. Women will find me attractive.
It used to be that only real nerds carried fobs. Damn you AOL.
Ok, I'm not anywhere familiar with reading patents, but as far as I can guess, we have plenty of prior art.
From reading the basics of it, and having almost gone into convulsions for attempting to understand it, heres what I can gather.
Re-directing a user to an "alternate address" is covered. So it doesn't have to be transpartent in the proxy sence, the client can be re-directed.
We all know CPAN, right?
CPAN redirects you to a mirror automatically. Thus CPAN is covered by this patent, if I read correctly that redirection is considered 'transparent'. CPAN also had a 'local copy' that you may have been redirected to. Further making it appear to be more of a 'proxy'. CPAN was created in 1995, two years prior to this patent.
There are hundred of other sites that were using this method prior to that, all prior to the patent.
AOL uses proxies, as does many countries (China anyone?), anyone know when they were first setup?
With all the talk about wardriving, I'm surprised noone else has thought about this.
So lets say a guy wearing this vest decides hes going to cut off someone driving a VW bug. Little does he know that inside that bug is a laptop computer and a wireless card, that just happened to catch your vest signal.
Suddenly wardriving takes on a whole new meaning. That guy in the bike pissing you off? No big deal! Flick of the switch and he'll go flying.
Humor aside, I don't trust anything wireless with my life.
As long as he can double-click on "The Internet" he'll be happy.
Windows has pretty much adopted a total ActiveX stance. Its "Windows Update" is ActiveX. The desktop since Win98 has been ActiveX enabled. Browsing your own hard drive through Explorer uses those same ActiveX libraries.
Not to mention how many sites use Flash and Java, that the patent would also cover.
What makes me curious is that statment that they said. The publically claimed to be seeking to knock Microsoft off its high-horse.
Can Microsoft use that statement against them in court, claiming that they arn't even seeking a reasonable resolution?
They are publicly claiming to be trying to cripple Microsoft, knowing fully how well they rely on ActiveX for buisness. Isn't.NET also covered by this patent? In which case wouldn't that make all thier newer products violiate the patient, since they all use the same libraries?
If they win, it would certainly change the way MS works. But I've yet to see someone stick to thier guns when offered a billion.
If someone were to goto the trouble of putting the EULA in XML format, yeah, I'd accept it.
And if someone made a Schema I could make the database conform to it as well.
I'm defenitly accepting any help for this project. Thats why I've adapted the policy from the start of making all the data I collect easily exportable in full and available to anyone who wants it (at least, to the extent I'm legally allowed to).
If someone else wishes to help, on any end of the project, please drop me a line. A good schema I imagine would make submissions easier for some people, but I'm also planning on making a front-end submit page.
The front end would parse the EULA initially and try to automatically categorize it based on provisional expressions (my fancy term for an array of regexs that match pre-defined provisions commonly found in EULAs), then I just go back and approve its findings or modify them accordingly (it actually runs it through aspell first to match even mis-spellings).
The system backend is still getting built, so I don't have much to show yet.:)
And pardon any delays in email, my box is currently flooded and I'm trying to sift through it all and send replies.
Part of the database that I'm setting up right now is based off a backend perl program that has 'provisional expressions'.
Meaning simply a set of regular expressions to match provisisions, so I don't have to read everything fully. It allows me to more easily add them to the database by having an automated program search for specific provisions.
I don't see any reason why I couldn't put this backend program on the frontend and just let someone upload an EULA and quickly see what it does and doesn't allow (of course, it would only know about what its defined to find out about).
But the database will be privisionally serchable, as well as each EULA will have a summary of which provisions it contains at the top. The summary should allow you to get a basic idea of what its about without having to read the whole thing.
Not a bad idea.. Could probably do something like this in the database. Thats what regular expressions are for, anyways.
Though even if I couldn't do it, I will be making the database exportable in one form or another as well. For anyone else who wants to manipulate the data to gather some other useful piece of information that I may not have considered in my implimentation.
What my idea so far has been is to break them up into categorized 'provisions'.
Some search options I'm thinking of:
Year, Yeay & Month, Product Name, Revision of said product, company who made the product, provisisions included, and of course full text search - with any combination of the above.
Thats to start, anyways. I'm sure as I add more to the database I'll find more ways to search it as well.
Right now it'll be done in MySQL. For no reason other then thats what my hosting company has readily avilable, and thats what I'm most familiar with.
Though I don't mind actually exporting it in other formats for other people who want want to do research off the same data.
Some of them may, but alot of the ones I'm looking for are for software that isn't even sold anymore. Or hardware for a company that doesn't exist.
While some I may have to avoid putting online because the contract (EULA) itself stipulates it can't be "reproduced" without permission, most of them should be legal to put online.
A dead company can't really sue me, right?
I'm not looking to put the database online to point out a certain companies practicies, but the changes the industry has made as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people seem to think the guy who wrote the article is an idiot.
He makes his living off of writing RPG games.
I won't argue on the look of his games. They have very obviously dated graphics.
But his games are not about graphics.
I've personally purchased 9 of his games over the years.
They have good story lines, long play times, multiple endings and have a bit of replay value.
He does make good games for those looking for a game with depth and story to them.
Hes also very sarcastic.
Take a look at what he wrote about his daughter.
As is site is aptly named - Irony Central - The irony is hes an RPG writer who happens to make a decent living off RPGs, and can write off every game he plays as research.
Seeing what he wrote though, I'm more curious what his next game is going to look like.
As he wrote about starting you off as a loser, thats exactly how his games start you as well.
I don't disagree with what you said.
College is quite useful in most fields. Research in CS as you stated is one.
And the PhDs, they should be doing something more useful.
But they applied, and we hired them.
I've heard all my life from those around me the importance of college, and how much it will change your career.
Most professions I agree it will, but programming most of the time simply isn't one of them.
A GUI? A client/server application? A CGI? A portal system? A shopping cart?
MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase, MSSQL, SQLite?
Most of whats designed online schools haven't caught up with yet, unless you count countries like India, where IT companies are actually creating their own colleges and teaching what they use, and not theory.
Google is research, and having a PhD there you can apply it and go wild. But for every one Google there are a hundred other companies that just want someone to maintain a shopping cart.
The pay may not be as good, but it can still pay pretty well. And often times for those people who have the advanced degrees its probably boring work.
One could argue the company doesn't take advantage of them, or that we don't manage them properly.
Reality is we don't have huge tasks that require complex solutions. And we made this very clear when we hired them.
They decided to stay. I'm guessing that they probably are bored to death. They do have the option to leave though.
But the work isn't going to get any more advanced then what it is.
I guess back to what I failed at being a point -
If your going to goto college for CS, and spend the time to learn more - Where can you apply it?
Most of the jobs out there, aside from those rare Google cases, just don't need those types of people.
For every 1 Picasso you need 5 people to just do the work. And odds are most people are just one of those 5.
And yes, I do partially suffer from that "I turned out OK". This is based on my own experiences in the companies I've worked for, and specific to the field.
I have no degree.
.. WHILE .. You loop over things .. You know, loops?"
In fact I'm a high-school dropout (though I got the GED).
I'm a manager at my current company.
I've had up to 12 people reporting to me.
Of those 12, 2 I count as Sr. people, and neither has ever gone to college.
And by Sr. I mean I can leave them alone and they just know what they are doing. The type you say "Give me a widget" and they'll go design what your thinking almost spot-on perfect.
I have had 3 people who have PhD's, they are all Jr. programmers who I'd say really are not that worth it.
One that no longer works here I had to explain over and over and over again how to do simple things.
"Its a while loop
I know there are large companies that "require" degrees, however I also know a lot of people who work for said companies and are utterly bored to death.
I work for a medium sized company that says "Degree or equivalent experience".
Working here I've written in C, perl, Lua, Java. I've written threaded to multiplexing to client/server to fancy GUI programs.
Been an admin, a networking engineer, a programmer, now the managers hat.
I have a world of freedom.
In my experience smaller to mid-sized companies are the most interesting.
I have a few friends who work for some larger companies.
Very few are given real freedom, especially in comparison to how much I have.
They tend to get stuck being one of X-thousand programmers, always working on the same thing, just a new revision.
So do you want a degree that a larger company may want, but you'll probably be bored to death?
Or a small to mid-sized company that probably doesn't require one and gives you more diverse assignments and keeps you interested?
Oh yeah, and my opinion as a hiring manager, we don't give much credit to degrees. I've yet to see one that actually teaches anything we use in the real world.
I'm sure its great for example with Google which does so much advanced mathematics work, but your not going to find that at most places.
This is of course just one managers opinion, your millage will vary.
Though its an opinion at least shared by many other execs I've talked to.
There are other companies trying to reclaim X-Com.
Aside from the two you mentioned, take a look at -
http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/
As well as -
http://ufo.myexp.de/
http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/
Ultima
While others have said Wing Commander, it wasn't itself driven to the ground as more or less abandoned.
Ultima however I'd qualify as driven to the ground in its last release.
Fallout
So many games after Fallout 2 claiming the "Fallout" name that basically drove to the ground.
The only hope is that Fallout 3 (now being worked on) can reclaim some of what it was.
Other ones that I consider more "abandoned" the driven to the ground -
Wizardry
Mentioned already, but the last game was still a pretty good game. It wasn't driven as much as left alone.
Most of the Bullfrog IP
Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Populous
Abandoned when purchased.
For that matter, doesn't it seem like most of the good PC games were killed off by EA?
I'm 29, I consider myself in that group.
I've got just under 80 PS2 games.
Every month I average the purchase of 1 PS2 game and 2-3 PC games.
I also enjoy getting out, have the girlfriend, and don't spend all my time inside.
Which also means I haven't actually played all the games I own, but I'm still a collector.
Oh yeah, and I own a PSP, DS Lite, X-Box (only found 2 games I liked on it - Strategy and RPG is my taste).
And yes, that means if I'll buy a system just to play two games, you can bet I'll be getting a PS3.
And I'll probably get a 360 when Mass Effect comes out.
A lot of my friends aren't as "hard core" as they used to be, due to various reasons (family, other interests, time, etc).
Me still being the hard-core one they always know who to turn to when they feel the urge to dive into gaming for a night.
Back in the day on the school yard, we used to beatup all the AOLers.
"My daddy just got me AOL, look everyone!"
Yeah, we'd pelt him with a few dozen free AOL CDs.
You could always spot the AOLers, with that vacent look in thier eyes, the look of the newly assimilated.
Now a days AOLers are getting more advanced, they are able to creep up on you. You don't know till its to late. "Come, see my computer". "No, wait! - Why, what have I ever done to you?!"
Now they have these fobs. I can see it now. Someday I'll return to the old school yard, and one of my friends will spot the fob. I'll profess how its not for AOL, its for work. They won't believe me. I'll be pelted with CDs. Branded a traitor. They'll find out that I've had an AIM address for years. I'll be denied entry to the clubs. Women will find me attractive.
It used to be that only real nerds carried fobs. Damn you AOL.
Ok, I'm not anywhere familiar with reading patents, but as far as I can guess, we have plenty of prior art.
From reading the basics of it, and having almost gone into convulsions for attempting to understand it, heres what I can gather.
Re-directing a user to an "alternate address" is covered. So it doesn't have to be transpartent in the proxy sence, the client can be re-directed.
We all know CPAN, right?
CPAN redirects you to a mirror automatically. Thus CPAN is covered by this patent, if I read correctly that redirection is considered 'transparent'. CPAN also had a 'local copy' that you may have been redirected to. Further making it appear to be more of a 'proxy'. CPAN was created in 1995, two years prior to this patent.
There are hundred of other sites that were using this method prior to that, all prior to the patent.
AOL uses proxies, as does many countries (China anyone?), anyone know when they were first setup?
With all the talk about wardriving, I'm surprised noone else has thought about this.
So lets say a guy wearing this vest decides hes going to cut off someone driving a VW bug. Little does he know that inside that bug is a laptop computer and a wireless card, that just happened to catch your vest signal.
Suddenly wardriving takes on a whole new meaning. That guy in the bike pissing you off? No big deal! Flick of the switch and he'll go flying.
Humor aside, I don't trust anything wireless with my life.
As long as he can double-click on "The Internet" he'll be happy.
.NET also covered by this patent? In which case wouldn't that make all thier newer products violiate the patient, since they all use the same libraries?
Windows has pretty much adopted a total ActiveX stance. Its "Windows Update" is ActiveX. The desktop since Win98 has been ActiveX enabled. Browsing your own hard drive through Explorer uses those same ActiveX libraries.
Not to mention how many sites use Flash and Java, that the patent would also cover.
What makes me curious is that statment that they said. The publically claimed to be seeking to knock Microsoft off its high-horse.
Can Microsoft use that statement against them in court, claiming that they arn't even seeking a reasonable resolution?
They are publicly claiming to be trying to cripple Microsoft, knowing fully how well they rely on ActiveX for buisness. Isn't
If they win, it would certainly change the way MS works. But I've yet to see someone stick to thier guns when offered a billion.
If someone were to goto the trouble of putting the EULA in XML format, yeah, I'd accept it.
:)
And if someone made a Schema I could make the database conform to it as well.
I'm defenitly accepting any help for this project. Thats why I've adapted the policy from the start of making all the data I collect easily exportable in full and available to anyone who wants it (at least, to the extent I'm legally allowed to).
If someone else wishes to help, on any end of the project, please drop me a line. A good schema I imagine would make submissions easier for some people, but I'm also planning on making a front-end submit page.
The front end would parse the EULA initially and try to automatically categorize it based on provisional expressions (my fancy term for an array of regexs that match pre-defined provisions commonly found in EULAs), then I just go back and approve its findings or modify them accordingly (it actually runs it through aspell first to match even mis-spellings).
The system backend is still getting built, so I don't have much to show yet.
And pardon any delays in email, my box is currently flooded and I'm trying to sift through it all and send replies.
Part of the database that I'm setting up right now is based off a backend perl program that has 'provisional expressions'.
Meaning simply a set of regular expressions to match provisisions, so I don't have to read everything fully. It allows me to more easily add them to the database by having an automated program search for specific provisions.
I don't see any reason why I couldn't put this backend program on the frontend and just let someone upload an EULA and quickly see what it does and doesn't allow (of course, it would only know about what its defined to find out about).
But the database will be privisionally serchable, as well as each EULA will have a summary of which provisions it contains at the top. The summary should allow you to get a basic idea of what its about without having to read the whole thing.
Not a bad idea .. Could probably do something like this in the database. Thats what regular expressions are for, anyways.
Though even if I couldn't do it, I will be making the database exportable in one form or another as well. For anyone else who wants to manipulate the data to gather some other useful piece of information that I may not have considered in my implimentation.
What my idea so far has been is to break them up into categorized 'provisions'.
Some search options I'm thinking of:
Year, Yeay & Month, Product Name, Revision of said product, company who made the product, provisisions included, and of course full text search - with any combination of the above.
Thats to start, anyways. I'm sure as I add more to the database I'll find more ways to search it as well.
Right now it'll be done in MySQL. For no reason other then thats what my hosting company has readily avilable, and thats what I'm most familiar with.
Though I don't mind actually exporting it in other formats for other people who want want to do research off the same data.
After X. Amount of years software falls into public domain. Refered to more commonly as 'Abandonware'.
I expect that same policy would also apply to the legal agreement of the software itself?
In which case the bulk of the EULAs I'd have online would be outdated and drop into public domain anyways.
Or am I mistaken on this?
Some of them may, but alot of the ones I'm looking for are for software that isn't even sold anymore. Or hardware for a company that doesn't exist.
While some I may have to avoid putting online because the contract (EULA) itself stipulates it can't be "reproduced" without permission, most of them should be legal to put online.
A dead company can't really sue me, right?
I'm not looking to put the database online to point out a certain companies practicies, but the changes the industry has made as a whole.