Especially since you could spend 5 minutes raking in the bins at your local mall and get 100 numbers.
This always comes up in these discussions, just as fraternities always drag out the "But we also do charity work!" line whenever they get busted for hazing. Has anyone who uses the above argument ever gone dumpster diving for CC numbers? I expect that the companies that provide credit card processing services for merchants are pretty hard-nosed about keeping numbers secret. If Sears throws all their receipts through a shredder, are you really going to be able to sift through that mess and find one good number? You'd be better off picking numbers randomly.
As Florman, a civil engineer, and other writers about technology have pointed out, anti-technology has become something of a national movement among the so-called intelligentsia in American life
It's not anti-technology, but appropriate technology. In the first half of this century, there was an unblinking faith in technology. This was especially true in the twenty years following WWII. Unfortunately this has led to some spectacular blunders, such as:
Heavy, indiscriminate use of pescticides and herbicides. Remember, when Silent Spring was published in the early sixties, the idea that hardcore pesticides like DDT weren't just peachy for people and the environment was pretty radical.
For a long time, all pregnant women were x-rayed to check the health of the fetus. It took twenty or more years of this before anyone figured out that it might not be the best idea.
What's been happening since the sixties, I think, is that some people have noticed that when you put the high-tech and low-tech solutions to some problems side-by-side, the high-tech solution isn't giving the amazing benefit that one would expect. In some cases, it's actually worse. For example, the US is one of the richest and most industrialized countries in the world, but it isn't even in the top ten in terms of low infant mortality rates; some of the countries ahead of the US are Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland. What's more, in most of these countries there is a much higher occurrence of low-tech births involving midwives, while in the US almost all births use high levels of medical intervention and midwifes are seen as backward. This makes one wonder if the extra medical technology is really a good idea in this particular case.
ANd what do Greenpeace get upset about ? Sinking oilrigs in the Atlantic, event though (a) they are virtually free of pollution and (b) far from disrupting the local ecosystems, they actuall y benefit it enormously.
Greenpeace has chosen it's own issues to deal with. Other non-profit groups have different concerns (e.g. The Nature Conservancy, ). And others are focused on Linux vs. Windows or software freedom.
Do any of the morons who happily pay 20% more for their "organic" food in my local supermarket KNOW that it poisons land far faster than normal chemical-enhanced practices ? No of course not. They make me sick.
You can't just pull nonsense out of the air like that and expect people to take it seriously. That's just anti-environmental FUD.
The true father of the Amiga was Jay Miner, who architected the system. Other names from the inner circle include Dale Luck, RJ Mical, and Dave Needle, but Mr. Miner (RIP) was the soul of the machine.
Licenses could cut down on headaches
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
Unlike most responders, I agree with the concept of an "internet license." I've thought about such a thing for seven or eight years now, going back to the wild n' wooly glory days of Usenet.
The issue isn't so much accountability. There's a certain set of mistakes that all newbies make when they realize that the web allows two-way communication:
1. They send mail to webmasters about "corrupted" files. 2. They jump into hot-headed discussions with the impression that topics such as abortion, the death penalty, the existence of God, and the health effects of smoking have never been debated before. 3. They spam friends and coworkers with annoying humor pieces that they've run across for the first time. 4. They fall for one or more of the old standbys: Craig Shergold wants greeting cards, there's an impending modem tax that needs to be fought, the Good Times virus, etc. 5. They drive everybody crazy with Blue Mountain Greeting cards.
Most of these have more to do with Usenet, email, and web-based discussion groups, and not just surfing for information. But it's hard to draw a line for someone not familiar with the entire concept of being online. Newbies usually come onto the web in a big way, then settle down greatly after three or four months. It would be nice to cut down on the nonsense caused by tens of millions of people in the process of working through those four months at any given moment.
The amount of pure genuis that forward-thinking that went into this game was amazing. Somebody had the brilliant idea of writing a networked game using the MIDI ports that were standard on all Atari ST computers. And, unbelivably, the game he came up with was essentially multi-player DOOM: eight people running around in a 3D maze shooting each other. In 1987!
Let me add some thoughts for those people who may not be heavily involved in the game industry (or, more specifically, the 3D engine side of the game industry). I'm going to say this in a positive way, without any complaining. Do you know:
1. Who wrote the incredible 3D engine for Descent 3, released a few months ago? (This game is flashier than Quake III, technology wise). 2. For that matter, who wrote the 3D engines for Descent 1 and Descent 2? 3. Who wrote the ultra-fast engine for the soon to be released Slave Zero (a Windows demo was released this past summer). 4. Who programmed 1989's multi-processor 3D arcade game, Hard Drivin', which was so groundbreaking it even made it into the color plate section of many graphics texts? 5. Who programmed the 3D Hard Drivin' inspired games Stunts and Stunt Driver, which were released for the PC before Wolftenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld? (These were "drive anyway, do anything" games, not "follow the track" games). 6. Who conceived and wrote the engines for the following popular racing games: The Need for Speed, Daytona, Ridge Racer, San Francisco Rush, and Hydro Thunder?
What's interesting is that none of these people are one hit wonders. All of them have stayed in the game industry and made huge contributions. But who do you hear about? Carmack and Sweeney. They may be the golden boys of publicity, but they're not alone in terms of technical prowess by any means.
The real question is, "What do they mean by 'mobility'?" That's a loaded buzzword if ever I've seen one. It could mean anything:
1. They're focusing on embedded applications, rather than so-called personal computers. 2. They're emphasizing low-power consumption for the growing laptop market. 3. Something to do with the "can emulate other processors" theory. 4. They're focusing on the nebulous information appliance market: cell phones, PDAs, cheap net surfing boxes.
And one of the reasons people are selecting simple passwords is because they have to remember so damn many of them. I have passwords for half a dozen online stores, four or five "must register" sites, two personal accounts, two accounts at work, not to mention that every bank, credit card company, IRA, public utility, and whatnot are starting to have password-protected "check your account" pages. Password overload!
It's the countries like China and Malaysia and Mexico where 90% of the items you find in any Target or Wal-Mart at made. Manufacturing or shipping snafus could easily result in shortages of thousands of common items that aren't otherwise available in the United States. Sad but true.
Consumers stopped caring about performance when CPU speeds topped about 133MHz. After that point there stopped being noticible performance improvements in the usual applications: Windows, Word, Internet Explorer, etc.
Well, okay, except for Adobe's Acrobat Reader which apparently needs about five more iterations of Moore's Law before it's completely usable.
Every few weeks it's "new video card with amazing blah blah blah features, faster than blah blah blah." Whatever. The real bottom line is:
1. The video card market is getting more and more fragmented. 2. Windows drivers are still buggy as hell and never seem to get beyond a beta stage. 3. The performance increase in applications (i.e. games) is hardly noticible. 4. We have to shell out $125-$250 for a new video card every six months. 5. We're just starting to get somewhat stable Linux drivers for cards released fifteen months ago, like those based on the Voodoo Banshee chipset. Most Linux distributions still don't include these drivers, even though the cards have sold millions of units.
This is a good reminder that getting too wrapped up in the "we must out-do Windows" nonsense may be a bad thing. Right now, much effort is going into writing a Windows-like desktop environment for Linux that's better than Windows. At the same time, the people working on these environments are duplicating many of the UI mistakes that Microsoft has been making over the years (for example, a heavy reliance on nested "pull right" menus, which the human interface folks have been preaching against for years).
ASPs may not be the only future, but it's one of many that's being neglected in the race to write a better Windows for Linux.
Yes. I too, wondered exactly what he meant by that statement. Was he saying that he wished he had chosen OpenBSD in retrospect because:
Read it again. He wishes he chose BSD because the Linux choice has attracted too much pointless attention. If he had chosen BSD, he wouldn't have been mentioned on./ or interviewed here, for example. With Linux come the groupies:)
Ah, I see lots of warm fuzzies about this "classic" game. But are they really because the game is a classic or because it was one of the first "3D" games seen by a generation of PC owners? The Wolfenstein 3D I remember had paper thin gameplay, was completely memorizable, and almost entirely unnotable except for the texture mapped walls (before you rave about gameplay innovation, remember that at least MIDI-Maze Xybots were basically the same game, except that MIDI-Maze allowed 8-player deathmatches--in 1987--and there were dozens of 3D games that came before Wolfenstein).
Doom was a masterpiece, but all the blathering about Wolfenstein 3D is peculiar. Like many a black and white coin-op from the mid-1970s, it has not aged well.
I've seen at least one statistic from Microsoft claiming over 60% of all new software is written in Visual Basic. In that same presentation, they claimed that only 20% of all software for the PC is written for the shrink wrapped market. This is the point of the whole "enterprise" buzz that started a few years ago. Traditional C-style applications are in the minority compared to in-house corporate web tools, custome databases, time trackers, etc.
Some of the people from the video game section of Hackers--most notably John Harris--were re-interviewed a few years ago for a book about video game history.
Ugh. I used to only read SF, but after being constantly immersed in programming (and, more recently, the internet), I can't stomach it any more. This is partially because of over-exposure and partially because I'm tired of the complete lack of well-roundedness among geeks. Good books I can recommend are Enchiladas, Rice, and Beans by Daniel Reveles, Beautiful Swimmers (non-fiction) by William Warner, and The Hills of Tuscany by Ferenc Mate.
Okay, and in the SF vein, A Canticle of Leibowitz is a true classic, if you can find it.
Hmmm...WinNT? I had a knee-jerk skeptical reaction, but his justification makes sense. Linus and team have done a brilliant job on the kernel. A text-mode Linux box is the system for serving up web pages or running such behind the scenes applications, and it's great for no-nonsense programming as well. But Linux hasn't remained the sparkly gem in the transition to being a graphical desktop environment. Little things have accreted to make Linux less than the dream it once seemed to be:
1. X servers don't hold up the "solid as a rock, no crashes" reputation that Linux has built for itself. Sometimes this is because of buggy servers or window managers, but more frequently it's because of driver problems. The common advice is "You can still recover. Just ssh in from another machine and skill the server processes." But what about the single machine home user?
2. There are beautiful window managers, but most X apps are still butt-ugly and inconsistent.
3. The new wave of desktop environments, like KDE, seem to be bent on being "like Windows, only better," which makes one wonder why he or she just isn't using Windows in the first place. Bad Windows user interfaces, like the reliance on multi-level pop-up menus--are being duplicated, despite the cries of human interface designers and sites like The User Interface Hall of Shame.
4. XWindows is becoming reliant on a good drivers, but the general driver philosophy in the Windows world is "get something that will hold together until the next generation product comes along, then who cares?"
Somehow we need to rewind and re-gain the rock solid reputation.
All your problems appear to be hardware related. You can only compare the two operating systems on hardware that both are at home with.
Now, see, here's a good example of the Linux mentality. None of the problems I mentioned occur under Windows, and I have a pretty plain-vanilla system (Dell), with a video card that shipped over a million units in the first six months. You can cry "hardware problem!" all you want, but it remains that none of these problems occur under Windows 95.
Someone else says I should recompile the kernel in order to get sound working. Now is it any wonder that the Gartner Group came to the conclusion that it did?
Seriously, would you recommend that the people you know currently using Windows switch to Linux? I think it's a pretty clear "no," though in a few years the story may be different. I'm a longtime UNIX user, have a CS degree, and have been programming since 1982. Still, I haven't gotten Linux to be as reliable as Windows 95 on the same machine. For example:
1. Accessing the Zip drive frequently locks up the machine, requiring a reboot. 2. I had to wait six or more months for a driver to show up for my Voodoo Banshee, then that driver resulted in a black screen about 20% of the time I started Xwindows, requiring a reboot. Eventually this was remedied, thank goodness. 3. I still have problems with fonts in an rvxt window leaving pixel garbage when I scroll. I figured that might be a Banshee driver problem, but I've tried three different versions from two sources (including Creative) and it hasn't gone away. A bad font, perhaps? 4. No luck getting sound working. I'll probably have to shell out $20 for a reliable driver.
To be fair, the Windows mouse driver locks up about once a week, requiring me to use keyboard shortcuts to restart the machine. But that's actually less frustrating than the Linux problems.
That's no FUD, just an honest (and unfortunate) personal experience.
People are going to be forced to live with their parents' choices for them. Today this is only true of names. There are lots of Generation X-ers (remember, that means anyone born from 1961 until 1981, not just anyone in college that owns a skateboard) with names like Mike and John and Dan and Adam. And there were big phases of naming girls Jennifer and boys Josh. Currently there's a rush to give kids odd names, like Griffin (boy) and Brady (girl) and Riley (boy) and Bergman (girl). Kids names can definitely be carbon-dated.
With full genetic engineering, this datedness will be more encompassing. Kids born in parts of the seventies and the post-grunge nineties will have very straight hair. There will be fad-driven bursts of waif-like girls and curvier girls. Remember, in just the last several hundred years it has been fashionable for women to be plump, men to wear high heels, and for high school kids to wear comically oversized jeans. If "looks and likes" are selectable by parents, then episode of Oprah is going to result in fifty thousand kids that are engineered to excel in the field of that day's guest.
A quick look through the classifieds in a major city will show what kinds of sofware developers are in demand. 80% of the ads mention terms like HTML, Foxpro, Oracle, AS/400, and Visual Basic (especially Visual Basic). Of the jobs that seem to require more than "I read the manual last weekend" skills, there's a pretty even split between C/C++, COBOL, and Perl. Java edges them all out, but in many cases it's obvious that the copywriter meant "Javascript" and not the actual computer language.
So, yes, there are apparently a plethora of programming jobs, but they're easily fillable by high school students, not computer science majors. There's more than McDonalds these days, kids!
This is basically procedural texturing and procedural modeling, which is hardly a new field. Here's an excellent two volume set on the subject. There have been a handful of games that have made use of procedural texturing, including Trespasser and Descent 3.
Too many self-described computer geeks and futurists blow it all by being thinking that:
* Star Wars * Star Trek * Blade Runner * Alien(s) * The Matrix
are some sorts of high-points in the history of brilliant storytelling. Good effects? Yes. Fun to watch? Yep. But they're pretty much pop-trash in the same way that Twinkies and Devil Dogs are.
Slashdot Mirror
This always comes up in these discussions, just as fraternities always drag out the "But we also do charity work!" line whenever they get busted for hazing. Has anyone who uses the above argument ever gone dumpster diving for CC numbers? I expect that the companies that provide credit card processing services for merchants are pretty hard-nosed about keeping numbers secret. If Sears throws all their receipts through a shredder, are you really going to be able to sift through that mess and find one good number? You'd be better off picking numbers randomly.
It's not anti-technology, but appropriate technology. In the first half of this century, there was an unblinking faith in technology. This was especially true in the twenty years following WWII. Unfortunately this has led to some spectacular blunders, such as:
Heavy, indiscriminate use of pescticides and herbicides. Remember, when Silent Spring was published in the early sixties, the idea that hardcore pesticides like DDT weren't just peachy for people and the environment was pretty radical.
For a long time, all pregnant women were x-rayed to check the health of the fetus. It took twenty or more years of this before anyone figured out that it might not be the best idea.
What's been happening since the sixties, I think, is that some people have noticed that when you put the high-tech and low-tech solutions to some problems side-by-side, the high-tech solution isn't giving the amazing benefit that one would expect. In some cases, it's actually worse. For example, the US is one of the richest and most industrialized countries in the world, but it isn't even in the top ten in terms of low infant mortality rates; some of the countries ahead of the US are Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland. What's more, in most of these countries there is a much higher occurrence of low-tech births involving midwives, while in the US almost all births use high levels of medical intervention and midwifes are seen as backward. This makes one wonder if the extra medical technology is really a good idea in this particular case.
Greenpeace has chosen it's own issues to deal with. Other non-profit groups have different concerns (e.g. The Nature Conservancy, ). And others are focused on Linux vs. Windows or software freedom.
Do any of the morons who happily pay 20% more for their "organic" food in my local supermarket KNOW that it poisons land far faster than normal chemical-enhanced practices ? No of course not. They make me sick.
You can't just pull nonsense out of the air like that and expect people to take it seriously. That's just anti-environmental FUD.
The true father of the Amiga was Jay Miner, who architected the system. Other names from the inner circle include Dale Luck, RJ Mical, and Dave Needle, but Mr. Miner (RIP) was the soul of the machine.
Unlike most responders, I agree with the concept of an "internet license." I've thought about such a thing for seven or eight years now, going back to the wild n' wooly glory days of Usenet.
The issue isn't so much accountability. There's a certain set of mistakes that all newbies make when they realize that the web allows two-way communication:
1. They send mail to webmasters about "corrupted" files.
2. They jump into hot-headed discussions with the impression that topics such as abortion, the death penalty, the existence of God, and the health effects of smoking have never been debated before.
3. They spam friends and coworkers with annoying humor pieces that they've run across for the first time.
4. They fall for one or more of the old standbys: Craig Shergold wants greeting cards, there's an impending modem tax that needs to be fought, the Good Times virus, etc.
5. They drive everybody crazy with Blue Mountain Greeting cards.
Most of these have more to do with Usenet, email, and web-based discussion groups, and not just surfing for information. But it's hard to draw a line for someone not familiar with the entire concept of being online. Newbies usually come onto the web in a big way, then settle down greatly after three or four months. It would be nice to cut down on the nonsense caused by tens of millions of people in the process of working through those four months at any given moment.
The amount of pure genuis that forward-thinking that went into this game was amazing. Somebody had the brilliant idea of writing a networked game using the MIDI ports that were standard on all Atari ST computers. And, unbelivably, the game he came up with was essentially multi-player DOOM: eight people running around in a 3D maze shooting each other. In 1987!
Let me add some thoughts for those people who may not be heavily involved in the game industry (or, more specifically, the 3D engine side of the game industry). I'm going to say this in a positive way, without any complaining. Do you know:
1. Who wrote the incredible 3D engine for Descent 3, released a few months ago? (This game is flashier than Quake III, technology wise).
2. For that matter, who wrote the 3D engines for Descent 1 and Descent 2?
3. Who wrote the ultra-fast engine for the soon to be released Slave Zero (a Windows demo was released this past summer).
4. Who programmed 1989's multi-processor 3D arcade game, Hard Drivin', which was so groundbreaking it even made it into the color plate section of many graphics texts?
5. Who programmed the 3D Hard Drivin' inspired games Stunts and Stunt Driver, which were released for the PC before Wolftenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld? (These were "drive anyway, do anything" games, not "follow the track" games).
6. Who conceived and wrote the engines for the following popular racing games: The Need for Speed, Daytona, Ridge Racer, San Francisco Rush, and Hydro Thunder?
What's interesting is that none of these people are one hit wonders. All of them have stayed in the game industry and made huge contributions. But who do you hear about? Carmack and Sweeney. They may be the golden boys of publicity, but they're not alone in terms of technical prowess by any means.
The real question is, "What do they mean by 'mobility'?" That's a loaded buzzword if ever I've seen one. It could mean anything:
1. They're focusing on embedded applications, rather than so-called personal computers.
2. They're emphasizing low-power consumption for the growing laptop market.
3. Something to do with the "can emulate other processors" theory.
4. They're focusing on the nebulous information appliance market: cell phones, PDAs, cheap net surfing boxes.
Hmmm.
And one of the reasons people are selecting simple passwords is because they have to remember so damn many of them. I have passwords for half a dozen online stores, four or five "must register" sites, two personal accounts, two accounts at work, not to mention that every bank, credit card company, IRA, public utility, and whatnot are starting to have password-protected "check your account" pages. Password overload!
It's the countries like China and Malaysia and Mexico where 90% of the items you find in any Target or Wal-Mart at made. Manufacturing or shipping snafus could easily result in shortages of thousands of common items that aren't otherwise available in the United States. Sad but true.
Consumers stopped caring about performance when CPU speeds topped about 133MHz. After that point there stopped being noticible performance improvements in the usual applications: Windows, Word, Internet Explorer, etc.
Well, okay, except for Adobe's Acrobat Reader which apparently needs about five more iterations of Moore's Law before it's completely usable.
Every few weeks it's "new video card with amazing blah blah blah features, faster than blah blah blah." Whatever. The real bottom line is:
1. The video card market is getting more and more fragmented.
2. Windows drivers are still buggy as hell and never seem to get beyond a beta stage.
3. The performance increase in applications (i.e. games) is hardly noticible.
4. We have to shell out $125-$250 for a new video card every six months.
5. We're just starting to get somewhat stable Linux drivers for cards released fifteen months ago, like those based on the Voodoo Banshee chipset. Most Linux distributions still don't include these drivers, even though the cards have sold millions of units.
This is a good reminder that getting too wrapped up in the "we must out-do Windows" nonsense may be a bad thing. Right now, much effort is going into writing a Windows-like desktop environment for Linux that's better than Windows. At the same time, the people working on these environments are duplicating many of the UI mistakes that Microsoft has been making over the years (for example, a heavy reliance on nested "pull right" menus, which the human interface folks have been preaching against for years).
ASPs may not be the only future, but it's one of many that's being neglected in the race to write a better Windows for Linux.
Read it again. He wishes he chose BSD because the Linux choice has attracted too much pointless attention. If he had chosen BSD, he wouldn't have been mentioned on ./ or interviewed here, for example. With Linux come the groupies :)
Ah, I see lots of warm fuzzies about this "classic" game. But are they really because the game is a classic or because it was one of the first "3D" games seen by a generation of PC owners? The Wolfenstein 3D I remember had paper thin gameplay, was completely memorizable, and almost entirely unnotable except for the texture mapped walls (before you rave about gameplay innovation, remember that at least MIDI-Maze Xybots were basically the same game, except that MIDI-Maze allowed 8-player deathmatches--in 1987--and there were dozens of 3D games that came before Wolfenstein).
Doom was a masterpiece, but all the blathering about Wolfenstein 3D is peculiar. Like many a black and white coin-op from the mid-1970s, it has not aged well.
I've seen at least one statistic from Microsoft claiming over 60% of all new software is written in Visual Basic. In that same presentation, they claimed that only 20% of all software for the PC is written for the shrink wrapped market. This is the point of the whole "enterprise" buzz that started a few years ago. Traditional C-style applications are in the minority compared to in-house corporate web tools, custome databases, time trackers, etc.
A damn good read, IMO.
Okay, and in the SF vein, A Canticle of Leibowitz is a true classic, if you can find it.
1. X servers don't hold up the "solid as a rock, no crashes" reputation that Linux has built for itself. Sometimes this is because of buggy servers or window managers, but more frequently it's because of driver problems. The common advice is "You can still recover. Just ssh in from another machine and skill the server processes." But what about the single machine home user?
2. There are beautiful window managers, but most X apps are still butt-ugly and inconsistent.
3. The new wave of desktop environments, like KDE, seem to be bent on being "like Windows, only better," which makes one wonder why he or she just isn't using Windows in the first place. Bad Windows user interfaces, like the reliance on multi-level pop-up menus--are being duplicated, despite the cries of human interface designers and sites like The User Interface Hall of Shame.
4. XWindows is becoming reliant on a good drivers, but the general driver philosophy in the Windows world is "get something that will hold together until the next generation product comes along, then who cares?"
Somehow we need to rewind and re-gain the rock solid reputation.
Now, see, here's a good example of the Linux mentality. None of the problems I mentioned occur under Windows, and I have a pretty plain-vanilla system (Dell), with a video card that shipped over a million units in the first six months. You can cry "hardware problem!" all you want, but it remains that none of these problems occur under Windows 95.
Someone else says I should recompile the kernel in order to get sound working. Now is it any wonder that the Gartner Group came to the conclusion that it did?
Seriously, would you recommend that the people you know currently using Windows switch to Linux? I think it's a pretty clear "no," though in a few years the story may be different. I'm a longtime UNIX user, have a CS degree, and have been programming since 1982. Still, I haven't gotten Linux to be as reliable as Windows 95 on the same machine. For example:
1. Accessing the Zip drive frequently locks up the machine, requiring a reboot.
2. I had to wait six or more months for a driver to show up for my Voodoo Banshee, then that driver resulted in a black screen about 20% of the time I started Xwindows, requiring a reboot. Eventually this was remedied, thank goodness.
3. I still have problems with fonts in an rvxt window leaving pixel garbage when I scroll. I figured that might be a Banshee driver problem, but I've tried three different versions from two sources (including Creative) and it hasn't gone away. A bad font, perhaps?
4. No luck getting sound working. I'll probably have to shell out $20 for a reliable driver.
To be fair, the Windows mouse driver locks up about once a week, requiring me to use keyboard shortcuts to restart the machine. But that's actually less frustrating than the Linux problems.
That's no FUD, just an honest (and unfortunate) personal experience.
People are going to be forced to live with their parents' choices for them. Today this is only true of names. There are lots of Generation X-ers (remember, that means anyone born from 1961 until 1981, not just anyone in college that owns a skateboard) with names like Mike and John and Dan and Adam. And there were big phases of naming girls Jennifer and boys Josh. Currently there's a rush to give kids odd names, like Griffin (boy) and Brady (girl) and Riley (boy) and Bergman (girl). Kids names can definitely be carbon-dated.
With full genetic engineering, this datedness will be more encompassing. Kids born in parts of the seventies and the post-grunge nineties will have very straight hair. There will be fad-driven bursts of waif-like girls and curvier girls. Remember, in just the last several hundred years it has been fashionable for women to be plump, men to wear high heels, and for high school kids to wear comically oversized jeans. If "looks and likes" are selectable by parents, then episode of Oprah is going to result in fifty thousand kids that are engineered to excel in the field of that day's guest.
A quick look through the classifieds in a major city will show what kinds of sofware developers are in demand. 80% of the ads mention terms like HTML, Foxpro, Oracle, AS/400, and Visual Basic (especially Visual Basic). Of the jobs that seem to require more than "I read the manual last weekend" skills, there's a pretty even split between C/C++, COBOL, and Perl. Java edges them all out, but in many cases it's obvious that the copywriter meant "Javascript" and not the actual computer language.
So, yes, there are apparently a plethora of programming jobs, but they're easily fillable by high school students, not computer science majors. There's more than McDonalds these days, kids!
This is basically procedural texturing and procedural modeling, which is hardly a new field. Here's an excellent two volume set on the subject. There have been a handful of games that have made use of procedural texturing, including Trespasser and Descent 3.
Too many self-described computer geeks and futurists blow it all by being thinking that:
* Star Wars
* Star Trek
* Blade Runner
* Alien(s)
* The Matrix
are some sorts of high-points in the history of brilliant storytelling. Good effects? Yes. Fun to watch? Yep. But they're pretty much pop-trash in the same way that Twinkies and Devil Dogs are.