You don't see ushers because there has been a change in attitude where companies no longer give a damn about their customers... If having one less usher will improve the bottom line, then he's gone.
I'd say it's because consumers have chosen to value price over service. They feel that that additional usher isn't worth paying for. And as long as the masses of customers feel that way, it doesn't matter whether *you* are willing to pay an extra dollar on each movie ticket to have ushers.
Companies (especially large ones) generally don't just randomly make movies like that. The public has voted with their wallet, and in general, they have voted for cheap products and services.
he has locked out all of the competitors for that job who aren't able to undercut free
And what's wrong with that?
What metric do you propose for choosing a worker and who is going to be screwed? I'd say that artificially restricting how much they're willing to do the work for is a little bizarre, actually.
30 minutes is long, yes, but trying to figure out what someone is talking about (especially if they're using domain-specific terminology that you're unfamiliar with) isn't necessarily trivial.
And the UI on the *task* bar (not the "start bar":-) ) is one of the greater disasters in the desktop world. I think the first time someone runs into the thing moving, they *always* spend a few minutes trying to figure out what the hell happened and how to manipulate it. It doesn't work like anything else in Windows, and the *obvious* (at least to me) and consistent way for the thing to operate, moving when you drag the *body* instead of the rim of the bar, does not work.
As an aside, one of the most annoying things is how current versions of IE, if completing a page render when the user is dragging the window (and assuming solid drag is off), "cancel" out of the drag. It's terribly confusing to users, and leads to a nasty perception of flakiness.
"what version of windows are you using?" "its a dell."
Why should they know or care what version of Windows comes up? Most people hit the power switch, grab a drink, and come back to the computer. And "Windows 98" could mean the damn thing was released in '98 or God knows what. Heck, even an experienced computer person from twenty years ago would be looking for a *version number*, not "Windows XP" or "Windows NT" for a "version".
"Ok, you're gonna have to get out your Windows CD." "Where would I find that?" [long pause] "...you're asking me where you'd find your Windows CD?" [No hint of anger or sarcasm] "Yes."
You know, that really isn't very unreasonable at all. The person probably got their system with a preinstalled OS. They got a little plastic packet with papers and installation CDs and whatnot inside of it. They didn't look at it, other than to maybe fill out the warranty card, because the system worked fine out of box. So they've got a bunch of *stuff* that came with the computer. With some laptops these days, you don't even get a CD.
So, what your answer should be is "It was bundled with your computer when you got it."
Seriously. If you took all the things that *I* say outside of my domain when I'm trying to figure something new out and how foolish and naive they must seem to a domain expert, I'm sure I'd look quite stupid. Sure, I can rescue data from a seriously trashed filesystem, but my idea of what qualifies as a capital asset is hazy. What things do I have to be careful of when driving a stick shift? Are there some drugs that shouldn't be taken together? When can I sue someone for harassment? What exactly does Krishna *do*? To an economist, auto mechanic, physician, civil lawyer or Hindi, I come off as a pretty big dolt. After all, to them these things are *obvious*. "Heck," they think, "if you sit down and think them through for a moment, *anyone* could understand this, regardless of their experience." Well, that might be true, but I haven't spent time thinking about some of these, and at the least, I'm much more comfortable *asking* a domain expert (especially if I'm paying one to be present and help me) than just guessing.
I'm sure this particular teacher could have been at fault, but I've seen a ton of people who manage to catch some trivial mistake a teacher made, and suddenly think that they're hot shit, years beyond the teacher. People are human...I'm sure Newton occasionally made mechanical arithmetic errors.
It's a lot easier to sound knowledgable when you sit there and look and think for ten minutes, then find one error and make a fifteen second statement than if you're trying to juggle giving a lecture, not exceeding or going under your desired time, talking for an hour and a half straight with no technical errors at all (covering some material that you may not be actively working with aside from this class), monitoring a room of students and trying to figure out if anyone looks confused, and trying to be audible to everyone in the room.
Again, your teacher certainly could be at fault -- I just want to point out that there *are* those that think they should be Orson Scott Card's protagonist because they catch a few errors.
Plenty of people on *Slashdot* are. The problem is getting Joe Sixpack away from CNN and "terrorist scare" stories that are doing a good job of keeping Bush's approval ratings high.
I mean, wartime presidents (as long as they avoid getting their ass kicked) get great ratings, and Bush just found the perfect solution -- a never-ending war that has no well-defined goals, is vaguely military in nature, and lets him accuse just about anyone.
Yeah, that's right, you just coded yourself out of a JOB!
And this is a temporary situation, brought on by a recession, too many programmers from the dot-com era.
You think there won't be software development work left, because it's all consumed? Get real. Walk into a business, *any* business, and look at the amount of *crap* they waste time doing that could be automated. Same for government agencies. I still don't have good speech recognition or synthesis on my computer. My car doesn't drive itself. I can't check to see how much a Jolly Pirate (kickass franchise, BTW...easily beats Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Doughnuts) doughnut is and where the closest location is by making ten taps or so on my PDA. I can't set up random speakers with a couple mics throughout the house and have the computer tune itself and dynamically generate a house-wide surround sound system, able to make a sound appear to come from anywhere in the house.
Golly gee, there seems to be a *whole freaking lot of programming that hasn't been done yet*! And for the forseeable future, at least twenty years or so, I don't see those getting finished!
You're complaining about not enough jobs. That's because the industry is busy dealing with a change in the market. Sudden changes screw everyone. But as long as there's coding out there that people want and find useful, there's going to be jobs out there as soon a business decides to provide it.
Blame the baby boomers, who threw *way* too much retirement money into various mutual funds and stocks, and then got burned and yanked *everything* out. Don't blame the industry. The industry is fine, and seven years from now, it'll have plenty of work again.
You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually. Might take a while to get reputations and standards in place, but eventually, it comes down to the fact that there *are* competent coders in that country who *are* willing to work for a lot less. OSS might have accelerated the move, but the existing $90k salaries for "web programmers" was simply not a stable state of affairs. What's more, the shift is just going to increase. If they aren't already doing it, the government or a private organization is going to start a certification program with rankings of various companies to help with B2B contract work.
And you know what? That's okay. Sure, for a brief while software developers were overpaid, and now there's a glut of them. Now things are changing.
What's the effect of all this, on everyone involved? Well, let's see. People in other countries pretty much benefit. US programmers drop down from their bubble-inflated pay. Some of them may be hurt during the adjustment, since they have to compete with a glut of competitors. The average US citizen likely benefits, since his new patterned carpet was fabricated by a machine that was cheap to produce because an Indian coder did all the software work.
So everyone gets trickle-down benefit. Globalization is, in the long run, good for just about everyone.
I'm sure that coders right now that just lost their sweet spot find this not a lot of consolation, but it affects everyone. The next step is using machines to replace fast food workers, and machines with better interfaces to replace phone support and salespeople.
Let me put things into perspective. In pioneer times, the US had a much less globalized environment. The lack of a transportation network meant that each area had to produce its own goods. And that means that things that we take for granted now, like granulated sugar and oranges, were *hideously* expensive. Sure, a lot of people lost in the short term (Peddler Smith, who packed a bunch of granulated sugar on his back, may have some tough competition with the upcoming railroads), but in the long term just about everyone won.
Globalization tends to spread out wealth more evenly, so it's true that some US wealth is going to end up in China or India. But it also tends to vastly increase the wealth of the entire system.
Right now, I can buy a keyboard for $10, and a mouse for $5. Just about anyone can afford a pair. That's thanks to overseas manufacturing of a lot of components -- massive globalization. I can buy almost any fruit I'd like, any time of the year. I can afford foods that used to be only for the seriously wealthy (and of poor quality), like pineapples, mangos, and oranges.
Now, sure, a few things become more expensive for your average guy. Anything based on human labor in the US becomes effectively tougher to get. You might have a tougher time getting someone willing to work as a maid or a chauffeur. But we've been dealing with the loss of this sort of job for centuries now, as the middle class swells up, so that's nothing new.
And what about society producing more goods than it can consume, with all these efficiency improvements, driving people out of work? Well, the US might get more socialized, with more government-subsidized benefits (like Europe). Plus, the human demand for luxury goods appears to be endless, so those with a job end up purchasing more unnecessary-to-survival items that end up employing the others.
Anyway, what the point of all this rambling is, is that moving stuff to India and other countries, opening up competition, reducing barriers to trade, and letting technology replace workers is a good thing in the long run, even if a few people are worse off temporarily.
There are a couple of reasons to make multiplayer games. First, it's a cheap way to get good AI. Good AI is hard, and it's easy to slap a people in chairs.
Second, there can be positive interaction, like chatting with friends. That can be good for the player experience.
Third, and this is not insignificant, it's much easier to stop piracy if the player *must* log into a server to play.
Okay. That pretty much sums up the pros of multiplayer gaming. Now for the cons.
First, player interaction can be pretty negative. I think Penny Arcade saidit best: "And those you encounter online are, almost as a rule, complete and utter cockmongers." Players will happily cheat, get angry and harass people, attack connections, etc, etc.
Second, multiplayer games with a central server frequently have monthly fees.
Third, single player games can be played...well, just about forever. If you loved X-COM, you can still sit down and play a good game of it. Players of the (much more recent) Weapons Factory Quake 2 mod are far more difficult to find.
Fourth, a computer can lose and lose and lose, and doesn't care. Players generally like to win more than half the time, which doesn't work too well for competitive multiplayer games (and purely cooperative games, while really neat, are *very* rare). So if players are playing an RTS, someone is probably getting unhappy.
Fifth, multiplayer games are much more open to failures. Firewalling, network problems, a slow connection, traffic from other users...all can contribute to be a real annoyance to the player playing the game.
Sixth, multiplayer games (with a *few* exceptions, like play-by-email games) must be real-time. To avoid inconveniencing other players, there is no pause feature. You can't get up and stretch or answer the door or do what you want whenever you want.
Seventh, it's very difficult to do a reasonably good plot-based multiplayer game. I can't think of any multiplayer games that use plot to much advantage.
I've looked at the shift towards online games with a profound lack of excitement. Sure, it's great for game companies, but it isn't all that great for game players.
Already, game companies are so eager to get on the game bandwagon that they've thrown a glut of games into every "fad" multiplayer genre that's come out. Three years or so ago, it was multiplayer FPSes. Everyone and their brother had to have a multiplayer FPS. More recently, a glut of "realistic" multiplayer FPSes has come out. There was a *huge* explosion in MMORPGs...and companies kept entering a market that they knew was already saturated.
Few really good single player games have come out in the past few years. Max Payne -- I didn't play it, but it was so cinematic that I watched a friend play through the entire game. Very impressive piece of work, sold very well...and yet, unlike multiplayer games, it didn't spawn twenty clones the next year.
The single-player RPG market for the PC is also pretty weak. There's a few, mostly obscure games. Arx Fatalis is pretty impressive. Blade of Darkness.
Kind of sad, the shift away from single player games. It used to be that you could play a fifteen-year-old game. People did too, and loved the nostalgia. Pac-Man, 1943, Centipede. Four years from now, all of today's games will be dead, because there will be almost no one playing them. [penny-arcade.com]
Frankly, this article, as well as almost all of the Ask Slashdots in recent memory, are no longer questions. They've become "I had a bad experience with (my employer, a company, a developer, you name it) and I want to build a little bad PR to get back at them". Ask Slashdots have become just a place to bitch, not a place to ask questions.
This really is a shame, because the idea of Ask Slashdot is very valuable. Editors simply should not let articles that are not *questions* through. Articles that contain one long string of complaints about someone followed by a random "question" tacked on the end to make it fit the format do not count.
There are a couple of reasons to make multiplayer games. First, it's a cheap way to get good AI. Good AI is hard, and it's easy to slap a people in chairs.
Second, there can be positive interaction, like chatting with friends. That can be good for the player experience.
Third, and this is not insignificant, it's much easier to stop piracy if the player *must* log into a server to play.
Okay. That pretty much sums up the pros of multiplayer gaming. Now for the cons.
First, player interaction can be pretty negative. I think Penny Arcade said it best: "And those you encounter online are, almost as a rule, complete and utter cockmongers." Players will happily cheat, get angry and harass people, attack connections, etc, etc.
Second, multiplayer games with a central server frequently have monthly fees.
Third, single player games can be played...well, just about forever. If you loved X-COM, you can still sit down and play a good game of it. Players of the (much more recent) Weapons Factory Quake 2 mod are far more difficult to find.
Fourth, a computer can lose and lose and lose, and doesn't care. Players generally like to win more than half the time, which doesn't work too well for competitive multiplayer games (and purely cooperative games, while really neat, are *very* rare). So if players are playing an RTS, someone is probably getting unhappy.
Fifth, multiplayer games are much more open to failures. Firewalling, network problems, a slow connection, traffic from other users...all can contribute to be a real annoyance to the player playing the game.
Sixth, multiplayer games (with a *few* exceptions, like play-by-email games) must be real-time. To avoid inconveniencing other players, there is no pause feature. You can't get up and stretch or answer the door or do what you want whenever you want.
Seventh, it's very difficult to do a reasonably good plot-based multiplayer game. I can't think of any multiplayer games that use plot to much advantage.
I've looked at the shift towards online games with a profound lack of excitement. Sure, it's great for game companies, but it isn't all that great for game players.
Already, game companies are so eager to get on the game bandwagon that they've thrown a glut of games into every "fad" multiplayer genre that's come out. Three years or so ago, it was multiplayer FPSes. Everyone and their brother had to have a multiplayer FPS. More recently, a glut of "realistic" multiplayer FPSes has come out. There was a *huge* explosion in MMORPGs...and companies kept entering a market that they knew was already saturated.
Few really good single player games have come out in the past few years. Max Payne -- I didn't play it, but it was so cinematic that I watched a friend play through the entire game. Very impressive piece of work, sold very well...and yet, unlike multiplayer games, it didn't spawn twenty clones the next year.
The single-player RPG market for the PC is also pretty weak. There's a few, mostly obscure games. Arx Fatalis is pretty impressive. Blade of Darkness.
Kind of sad, the shift away from single player games. It used to be that you could play a fifteen-year-old game. People did too, and loved the nostalgia. Pac-Man, 1943, Centipede. Four years from now, all of today's games will be dead, because there will be almost no one playing them.
Excuse you, but Clinical Depression is not just 'the blues', or feeling a little sad because your boss yelled at you, etc etc.
Yes, I'm aware of the differences.
It's a real disease, and sometimes pills are one of the only, if not the only, treatments with any reasonable degree of effectiveness.
Sure. The common cold is a real disease. Allergies (of the severity that make your nose run constantly for a season, not the kind that cuts off your airways) are as well. And neither are particularly pleasant, but people can also cope with each without throwing down Prozac or Claratin. And if they can't, then they may well have to be...depressed.
The point of my original point is not to attack people who suffer from clinical depression in particular. It's that we're giving ourselves all sorts of perks and rewards that the competition is doing without, and that aren't really all that necessary.
I see why they're doing what they're doing. It may sound trivial to you to revamp a lesson plan, but
1) The point of having an experienced professor is that they can *reuse* what they've learned for previous years. I had an excellent professor, Prof. Rudich, at Carnegie Mellon University. He put it pretty well -- "I've found what I consider the most important, the most enlightening problems I could turn up over the years. I could change them from year to year, but then I wouldn't be giving everyone the *best* questions I've found." And his assignments, while decidedly tough, really were incredibly good.
2) It may sound really minor to you to swap in new programming assignments. However, it really isn't. Designing and debugging a lab is a lot of work. I've found that frequently labs aren't really solid and clear until their third year or so in use.
3) It's really frusterating to professors who teach classes that might have this one as a prereq to have half the class have covered a particular issue (because one lab brought it up) and the other half not.
I think a better solution, though perhaps a bit harder to enforce, is to allow students that have already written code to do whatever they want to with it. However, a copy of their code *must* stay on file.
Then, professors can use moss or something similar to look for duplicate code.
I feel that this approach, which would let students do what they want with their own code, would also provide a more realistic simulation of a production environment. When you're writing commercial code, there's always plenty of GPLed code out there to take. But if your license conflicts with the GPL (or your contract states that you need to write everything yourself for some reason, which happens here), and you run out and break it and then get caught, you get hung out to dry.
Attempting to stop the problem by preventing sharing of answers is difficult to prevent (if it's done privately), difficult to enforce (what if the person has graduated or is at another university that had a very similar assignment?).
Finally, I want to mention that I support at least some effort to avoid cheating. Simply "trusting students" sounds wonderful, but utterly fails in practice...the level of cheating in CS courses astounds me sometimes. Yes, certain types of assignments are more cheat-proof, but are also less useful in teaching.
Would my car perform any better if I had the precise engineering details about how every little part worked? Of course not, because I don't have a Ph.D in mechanical engineering and don't study chemistry.
No, but didja ever think that *maybe* chemists out there might want to put their own ideas and improvements into practice?
And unlike the auto world, in the computer world it's *very* easy to propogate one person's improvements around to everyone.
Linux isn't necessary inherently better just because the source code is widely available.
It's certainly an edge, though it doesn't make it better-regardless-of-other-factors.
The fact that it's also free-as-in-beer is a pretty big incentive, though.
India is no different, and I strongly advise them to buy an already working package for a fair price rather than tinkering with projects that are 20% complete and may never be more than halfway finished.
There are plenty of commercial programs that I don't consider particularly finished, and there are plenty of open-source programs that are finished.
Most stuff that you get when you download a Red Hat ISO is pretty solid stuff. Sure, you can get at CVS to a bunch of projects if you'd like to as well.
Oh, and all you complaining about not having a job -- I think Microsoft and other American companies getting more business means that there'll be more jobs here on the homefront. Just a thought...I'm not economic genius, but it seems to make sense doesn't it?
Keeping jobs in an environment where American workers are demanding obscene pay and benefits and aren't providing equivalently better performance is always going to be an issue. That's an unstable system that's going to break sooner or later. The only solution is for US workers to reduce their demands and take advantage of the benefits their government offers them. Are they drinking beer and watching football on the weekends, or studying a book from our free library system?
Your rant sounds much like the idiotic xenophobia and hyper-nationalism present in Germany that let Hitler come to power.
No one, including the United States, can just close their doors and shut out the outside world. And the outside world is willing to work without also requiring wages that purchase an HDTV, SUV, high-end computer, and two-story house.
US developers still have benefits over Indian ones. They're closer, easier to communicate with.
So you just have to leverage that.
Which means maybe eating plainer foods, not eating out at restauraunts, driving a used car, not upgrading your home theater and computer yearly, not going on cruises, and not goofing off at work. Not buying pills for minor things like depression. Not owning a second car. Becaue the competition is willing to do this and more. So you can evolve...or die.
The Register had an article on this. At the bottom was a bit by the article author saying that when Sendo started the MS deal, the author asked them whether MS might just take their code and run, given that Sendo is just a small company. Microsoft had had a pretty solid history of doing this by this oint. Sendo said that no, MS wouldn't do anything like that.
There are those of us that have one major issue with the GPL -- the amount of trust one is forced to put in the FSF. The FSF now has enormous intellectual property power by having the ability to revise the license on a very large amount of software.
Now, maybe the FSF is "okay" for a couple years. Or maybe Stallman decides to give special favors to companies that donate large amounts of money to the FSF (the idea has already been batted around). Fifty years from now, unless the GPL flops, it will be enormously influential and powerful. Stallman will likely be dead, and a new generation or two will have passed through the organization. Do you trust the FSF to have that much power a few years down the road? Especially when it becomes *worth* it to bribe an FSF member with a few million dollars?
The FSF is the single point of failure of the GPL. Sure, you can do what Linus does and use "GPL v2 only", but very, very few people do so.
Anyway, patents would be even more nasty. If a viral-style license was produced, where you could use any FSF-owned patents as long as you also donate any other patents used on a project to the FSF, you have an *incredibly* quickly growing virus. It's *very* hard to avoid infrining a huge body of patents (unlike copyright, where you just avoid copying any GPLed code).
Ick. It's a bit disturbing, and moreso the fact that there are apparently a number of other landmarks that are trademarked.
I strongly suspect that, even had the appeals court been able to find that the image of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had strong commercial associations, the use the photographer made of the trademark would have been deemed legitimate.
My guess is that the court just wanted the strongest grounds possible to throw out the ruling. They didn't need to debate whether trademarking a building was legitimate, because the photographer wasn't infringing under even conventional trademark issues. They are not required to list all the reasons a previous ruling might have been invalid.
I'm not formally an IP guy either, though I like talking about it.:-)
It would be very difficult to patent a copyright or a trademark, because you need to patent a *process*, not just an image. A patent on an invention wouldn't even protect an image containing a blueprint of that invention, since information on patented devices can be exchanged freely -- it's just that the patent devices can't actually be produced.
The fourth prong of IP, trade secrets, doesn't apply either, because both trademarks and patents must be registered and publically available, which would invalidate a piece of information's trade secret status.
I think you could have a copyrighted document that contained information protected as a trade secret. However, they could be separated -- producing a (different) work describing the trade secret would violate only the trade secret law, not copyright law.
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Sorta took the wind out of the sails of his complaint, didn't it? :-)
You don't see ushers because there has been a change in attitude where companies no longer give a damn about their customers... If having one less usher will improve the bottom line, then he's gone.
I'd say it's because consumers have chosen to value price over service. They feel that that additional usher isn't worth paying for. And as long as the masses of customers feel that way, it doesn't matter whether *you* are willing to pay an extra dollar on each movie ticket to have ushers.
Companies (especially large ones) generally don't just randomly make movies like that. The public has voted with their wallet, and in general, they have voted for cheap products and services.
he has locked out all of the competitors for that job who aren't able to undercut free
And what's wrong with that?
What metric do you propose for choosing a worker and who is going to be screwed? I'd say that artificially restricting how much they're willing to do the work for is a little bizarre, actually.
30 minutes is long, yes, but trying to figure out what someone is talking about (especially if they're using domain-specific terminology that you're unfamiliar with) isn't necessarily trivial.
:-) ) is one of the greater disasters in the desktop world. I think the first time someone runs into the thing moving, they *always* spend a few minutes trying to figure out what the hell happened and how to manipulate it. It doesn't work like anything else in Windows, and the *obvious* (at least to me) and consistent way for the thing to operate, moving when you drag the *body* instead of the rim of the bar, does not work.
And the UI on the *task* bar (not the "start bar"
As an aside, one of the most annoying things is how current versions of IE, if completing a page render when the user is dragging the window (and assuming solid drag is off), "cancel" out of the drag. It's terribly confusing to users, and leads to a nasty perception of flakiness.
"what version of windows are you using?"
"its a dell."
Why should they know or care what version of Windows comes up? Most people hit the power switch, grab a drink, and come back to the computer. And "Windows 98" could mean the damn thing was released in '98 or God knows what. Heck, even an experienced computer person from twenty years ago would be looking for a *version number*, not "Windows XP" or "Windows NT" for a "version".
"Ok, you're gonna have to get out your Windows CD."
"Where would I find that?"
[long pause] "...you're asking me where you'd find your Windows CD?"
[No hint of anger or sarcasm] "Yes."
You know, that really isn't very unreasonable at all. The person probably got their system with a preinstalled OS. They got a little plastic packet with papers and installation CDs and whatnot inside of it. They didn't look at it, other than to maybe fill out the warranty card, because the system worked fine out of box. So they've got a bunch of *stuff* that came with the computer. With some laptops these days, you don't even get a CD.
So, what your answer should be is "It was bundled with your computer when you got it."
Seriously. If you took all the things that *I* say outside of my domain when I'm trying to figure something new out and how foolish and naive they must seem to a domain expert, I'm sure I'd look quite stupid. Sure, I can rescue data from a seriously trashed filesystem, but my idea of what qualifies as a capital asset is hazy. What things do I have to be careful of when driving a stick shift? Are there some drugs that shouldn't be taken together? When can I sue someone for harassment? What exactly does Krishna *do*? To an economist, auto mechanic, physician, civil lawyer or Hindi, I come off as a pretty big dolt. After all, to them these things are *obvious*. "Heck," they think, "if you sit down and think them through for a moment, *anyone* could understand this, regardless of their experience." Well, that might be true, but I haven't spent time thinking about some of these, and at the least, I'm much more comfortable *asking* a domain expert (especially if I'm paying one to be present and help me) than just guessing.
I'm sure this particular teacher could have been at fault, but I've seen a ton of people who manage to catch some trivial mistake a teacher made, and suddenly think that they're hot shit, years beyond the teacher. People are human...I'm sure Newton occasionally made mechanical arithmetic errors.
It's a lot easier to sound knowledgable when you sit there and look and think for ten minutes, then find one error and make a fifteen second statement than if you're trying to juggle giving a lecture, not exceeding or going under your desired time, talking for an hour and a half straight with no technical errors at all (covering some material that you may not be actively working with aside from this class), monitoring a room of students and trying to figure out if anyone looks confused, and trying to be audible to everyone in the room.
Again, your teacher certainly could be at fault -- I just want to point out that there *are* those that think they should be Orson Scott Card's protagonist because they catch a few errors.
In West Virginia the average steelworker wage has been higher than the average programmer's wage for at least a decade.
Plenty of people on *Slashdot* are. The problem is getting Joe Sixpack away from CNN and "terrorist scare" stories that are doing a good job of keeping Bush's approval ratings high.
I mean, wartime presidents (as long as they avoid getting their ass kicked) get great ratings, and Bush just found the perfect solution -- a never-ending war that has no well-defined goals, is vaguely military in nature, and lets him accuse just about anyone.
Yeah, that's right, you just coded yourself out of a JOB!
And this is a temporary situation, brought on by a recession, too many programmers from the dot-com era.
You think there won't be software development work left, because it's all consumed? Get real. Walk into a business, *any* business, and look at the amount of *crap* they waste time doing that could be automated. Same for government agencies. I still don't have good speech recognition or synthesis on my computer. My car doesn't drive itself. I can't check to see how much a Jolly Pirate (kickass franchise, BTW...easily beats Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Doughnuts) doughnut is and where the closest location is by making ten taps or so on my PDA. I can't set up random speakers with a couple mics throughout the house and have the computer tune itself and dynamically generate a house-wide surround sound system, able to make a sound appear to come from anywhere in the house.
Golly gee, there seems to be a *whole freaking lot of programming that hasn't been done yet*! And for the forseeable future, at least twenty years or so, I don't see those getting finished!
You're complaining about not enough jobs. That's because the industry is busy dealing with a change in the market. Sudden changes screw everyone. But as long as there's coding out there that people want and find useful, there's going to be jobs out there as soon a business decides to provide it.
Blame the baby boomers, who threw *way* too much retirement money into various mutual funds and stocks, and then got burned and yanked *everything* out. Don't blame the industry. The industry is fine, and seven years from now, it'll have plenty of work again.
You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually. Might take a while to get reputations and standards in place, but eventually, it comes down to the fact that there *are* competent coders in that country who *are* willing to work for a lot less. OSS might have accelerated the move, but the existing $90k salaries for "web programmers" was simply not a stable state of affairs. What's more, the shift is just going to increase. If they aren't already doing it, the government or a private organization is going to start a certification program with rankings of various companies to help with B2B contract work.
And you know what? That's okay. Sure, for a brief while software developers were overpaid, and now there's a glut of them. Now things are changing.
What's the effect of all this, on everyone involved? Well, let's see. People in other countries pretty much benefit. US programmers drop down from their bubble-inflated pay. Some of them may be hurt during the adjustment, since they have to compete with a glut of competitors. The average US citizen likely benefits, since his new patterned carpet was fabricated by a machine that was cheap to produce because an Indian coder did all the software work.
So everyone gets trickle-down benefit. Globalization is, in the long run, good for just about everyone.
I'm sure that coders right now that just lost their sweet spot find this not a lot of consolation, but it affects everyone. The next step is using machines to replace fast food workers, and machines with better interfaces to replace phone support and salespeople.
Let me put things into perspective. In pioneer times, the US had a much less globalized environment. The lack of a transportation network meant that each area had to produce its own goods. And that means that things that we take for granted now, like granulated sugar and oranges, were *hideously* expensive. Sure, a lot of people lost in the short term (Peddler Smith, who packed a bunch of granulated sugar on his back, may have some tough competition with the upcoming railroads), but in the long term just about everyone won.
Globalization tends to spread out wealth more evenly, so it's true that some US wealth is going to end up in China or India. But it also tends to vastly increase the wealth of the entire system.
Right now, I can buy a keyboard for $10, and a mouse for $5. Just about anyone can afford a pair. That's thanks to overseas manufacturing of a lot of components -- massive globalization. I can buy almost any fruit I'd like, any time of the year. I can afford foods that used to be only for the seriously wealthy (and of poor quality), like pineapples, mangos, and oranges.
Now, sure, a few things become more expensive for your average guy. Anything based on human labor in the US becomes effectively tougher to get. You might have a tougher time getting someone willing to work as a maid or a chauffeur. But we've been dealing with the loss of this sort of job for centuries now, as the middle class swells up, so that's nothing new.
And what about society producing more goods than it can consume, with all these efficiency improvements, driving people out of work? Well, the US might get more socialized, with more government-subsidized benefits (like Europe). Plus, the human demand for luxury goods appears to be endless, so those with a job end up purchasing more unnecessary-to-survival items that end up employing the others.
Anyway, what the point of all this rambling is, is that moving stuff to India and other countries, opening up competition, reducing barriers to trade, and letting technology replace workers is a good thing in the long run, even if a few people are worse off temporarily.
ALL Online RPGs are like this.
There are a couple of reasons to make multiplayer games. First, it's a cheap way to get good AI. Good AI is hard, and it's easy to slap a people in chairs.
Second, there can be positive interaction, like chatting with friends. That can be good for the player experience.
Third, and this is not insignificant, it's much easier to stop piracy if the player *must* log into a server to play.
Okay. That pretty much sums up the pros of multiplayer gaming. Now for the cons.
First, player interaction can be pretty negative. I think Penny Arcade saidit best: "And those you encounter online are, almost as a rule, complete and utter cockmongers." Players will happily cheat, get angry and harass people, attack connections, etc, etc.
Second, multiplayer games with a central server frequently have monthly fees.
Third, single player games can be played...well, just about forever. If you loved X-COM, you can still sit down and play a good game of it. Players of the (much more recent) Weapons Factory Quake 2 mod are far more difficult to find.
Fourth, a computer can lose and lose and lose, and doesn't care. Players generally like to win more than half the time, which doesn't work too well for competitive multiplayer games (and purely cooperative games, while really neat, are *very* rare). So if players are playing an RTS, someone is probably getting unhappy.
Fifth, multiplayer games are much more open to failures. Firewalling, network problems, a slow connection, traffic from other users...all can contribute to be a real annoyance to the player playing the game.
Sixth, multiplayer games (with a *few* exceptions, like play-by-email games) must be real-time. To avoid inconveniencing other players, there is no pause feature. You can't get up and stretch or answer the door or do what you want whenever you want.
Seventh, it's very difficult to do a reasonably good plot-based multiplayer game. I can't think of any multiplayer games that use plot to much advantage.
I've looked at the shift towards online games with a profound lack of excitement. Sure, it's great for game companies, but it isn't all that great for game players.
Already, game companies are so eager to get on the game bandwagon that they've thrown a glut of games into every "fad" multiplayer genre that's come out. Three years or so ago, it was multiplayer FPSes. Everyone and their brother had to have a multiplayer FPS. More recently, a glut of "realistic" multiplayer FPSes has come out. There was a *huge* explosion in MMORPGs...and companies kept entering a market that they knew was already saturated.
Few really good single player games have come out in the past few years. Max Payne -- I didn't play it, but it was so cinematic that I watched a friend play through the entire game. Very impressive piece of work, sold very well...and yet, unlike multiplayer games, it didn't spawn twenty clones the next year.
The single-player RPG market for the PC is also pretty weak. There's a few, mostly obscure games. Arx Fatalis is pretty impressive. Blade of Darkness.
Kind of sad, the shift away from single player games. It used to be that you could play a fifteen-year-old game. People did too, and loved the nostalgia. Pac-Man, 1943, Centipede. Four years from now, all of today's games will be dead, because there will be almost no one playing them. [penny-arcade.com]
I used a bit of hyperbole, I suppose, but the proportion is still far higher than it should be.
Read the list you just pointed to.
Frankly, this article, as well as almost all of the Ask Slashdots in recent memory, are no longer questions. They've become "I had a bad experience with (my employer, a company, a developer, you name it) and I want to build a little bad PR to get back at them". Ask Slashdots have become just a place to bitch, not a place to ask questions.
This really is a shame, because the idea of Ask Slashdot is very valuable. Editors simply should not let articles that are not *questions* through. Articles that contain one long string of complaints about someone followed by a random "question" tacked on the end to make it fit the format do not count.
ALL Online RPGs are like this.
There are a couple of reasons to make multiplayer games. First, it's a cheap way to get good AI. Good AI is hard, and it's easy to slap a people in chairs.
Second, there can be positive interaction, like chatting with friends. That can be good for the player experience.
Third, and this is not insignificant, it's much easier to stop piracy if the player *must* log into a server to play.
Okay. That pretty much sums up the pros of multiplayer gaming. Now for the cons.
First, player interaction can be pretty negative. I think Penny Arcade said
it best: "And those you encounter online are, almost as a rule, complete and utter cockmongers." Players will happily cheat, get angry and harass people, attack connections, etc, etc.
Second, multiplayer games with a central server frequently have monthly fees.
Third, single player games can be played...well, just about forever. If you loved X-COM, you can still sit down and play a good game of it. Players of the (much more recent) Weapons Factory Quake 2 mod are far more difficult to find.
Fourth, a computer can lose and lose and lose, and doesn't care. Players generally like to win more than half the time, which doesn't work too well for competitive multiplayer games (and purely cooperative games, while really neat, are *very* rare). So if players are playing an RTS, someone is probably getting unhappy.
Fifth, multiplayer games are much more open to failures. Firewalling, network problems, a slow connection, traffic from other users...all can contribute to be a real annoyance to the player playing the game.
Sixth, multiplayer games (with a *few* exceptions, like play-by-email games) must be real-time. To avoid inconveniencing other players, there is no pause feature. You can't get up and stretch or answer the door or do what you want whenever you want.
Seventh, it's very difficult to do a reasonably good plot-based multiplayer game. I can't think of any multiplayer games that use plot to much advantage.
I've looked at the shift towards online games with a profound lack of excitement. Sure, it's great for game companies, but it isn't all that great for game players.
Already, game companies are so eager to get on the game bandwagon that they've thrown a glut of games into every "fad" multiplayer genre that's come out. Three years or so ago, it was multiplayer FPSes. Everyone and their brother had to have a multiplayer FPS. More recently, a glut of "realistic" multiplayer FPSes has come out. There was a *huge* explosion in MMORPGs...and companies kept entering a market that they knew was already saturated.
Few really good single player games have come out in the past few years. Max Payne -- I didn't play it, but it was so cinematic that I watched a friend play through the entire game. Very impressive piece of work, sold very well...and yet, unlike multiplayer games, it didn't spawn twenty clones the next year.
The single-player RPG market for the PC is also pretty weak. There's a few, mostly obscure games. Arx Fatalis is pretty impressive. Blade of Darkness.
Kind of sad, the shift away from single player games. It used to be that you could play a fifteen-year-old game. People did too, and loved the nostalgia. Pac-Man, 1943, Centipede. Four years from now, all of today's games will be dead, because there will be almost no one playing them.
That's ridiculous, and both of us know it.
Excuse you, but Clinical Depression is not just 'the blues', or feeling a little sad because your boss yelled at you, etc etc.
Yes, I'm aware of the differences.
It's a real disease, and sometimes pills are one of the only, if not the only, treatments with any reasonable degree of effectiveness.
Sure. The common cold is a real disease. Allergies (of the severity that make your nose run constantly for a season, not the kind that cuts off your airways) are as well. And neither are particularly pleasant, but people can also cope with each without throwing down Prozac or Claratin. And if they can't, then they may well have to be...depressed.
The point of my original point is not to attack people who suffer from clinical depression in particular. It's that we're giving ourselves all sorts of perks and rewards that the competition is doing without, and that aren't really all that necessary.
I see why they're doing what they're doing. It may sound trivial to you to revamp a lesson plan, but
1) The point of having an experienced professor is that they can *reuse* what they've learned for previous years. I had an excellent professor, Prof. Rudich, at Carnegie Mellon University. He put it pretty well -- "I've found what I consider the most important, the most enlightening problems I could turn up over the years. I could change them from year to year, but then I wouldn't be giving everyone the *best* questions I've found." And his assignments, while decidedly tough, really were incredibly good.
2) It may sound really minor to you to swap in new programming assignments. However, it really isn't. Designing and debugging a lab is a lot of work. I've found that frequently labs aren't really solid and clear until their third year or so in use.
3) It's really frusterating to professors who teach classes that might have this one as a prereq to have half the class have covered a particular issue (because one lab brought it up) and the other half not.
I think a better solution, though perhaps a bit harder to enforce, is to allow students that have already written code to do whatever they want to with it. However, a copy of their code *must* stay on file.
Then, professors can use moss or something similar to look for duplicate code.
I feel that this approach, which would let students do what they want with their own code, would also provide a more realistic simulation of a production environment. When you're writing commercial code, there's always plenty of GPLed code out there to take. But if your license conflicts with the GPL (or your contract states that you need to write everything yourself for some reason, which happens here), and you run out and break it and then get caught, you get hung out to dry.
Attempting to stop the problem by preventing sharing of answers is difficult to prevent (if it's done privately), difficult to enforce (what if the person has graduated or is at another university that had a very similar assignment?).
Finally, I want to mention that I support at least some effort to avoid cheating. Simply "trusting students" sounds wonderful, but utterly fails in practice...the level of cheating in CS courses astounds me sometimes. Yes, certain types of assignments are more cheat-proof, but are also less useful in teaching.
That's funny because it's true.
Would my car perform any better if I had the precise engineering details about how every little part worked? Of course not, because I don't have a Ph.D in mechanical engineering and don't study chemistry.
No, but didja ever think that *maybe* chemists out there might want to put their own ideas and improvements into practice?
And unlike the auto world, in the computer world it's *very* easy to propogate one person's improvements around to everyone.
Linux isn't necessary inherently better just because the source code is widely available.
It's certainly an edge, though it doesn't make it better-regardless-of-other-factors.
The fact that it's also free-as-in-beer is a pretty big incentive, though.
India is no different, and I strongly advise them to buy an already working package for a fair price rather than tinkering with projects that are 20% complete and may never be more than halfway finished.
There are plenty of commercial programs that I don't consider particularly finished, and there are plenty of open-source programs that are finished.
Most stuff that you get when you download a Red Hat ISO is pretty solid stuff. Sure, you can get at CVS to a bunch of projects if you'd like to as well.
Oh, and all you complaining about not having a job -- I think Microsoft and other American companies getting more business means that there'll be more jobs here on the homefront. Just a thought...I'm not economic genius, but it seems to make sense doesn't it?
Keeping jobs in an environment where American workers are demanding obscene pay and benefits and aren't providing equivalently better performance is always going to be an issue. That's an unstable system that's going to break sooner or later. The only solution is for US workers to reduce their demands and take advantage of the benefits their government offers them. Are they drinking beer and watching football on the weekends, or studying a book from our free library system?
Your rant sounds much like the idiotic xenophobia and hyper-nationalism present in Germany that let Hitler come to power.
No one, including the United States, can just close their doors and shut out the outside world. And the outside world is willing to work without also requiring wages that purchase an HDTV, SUV, high-end computer, and two-story house.
US developers still have benefits over Indian ones. They're closer, easier to communicate with.
So you just have to leverage that.
Which means maybe eating plainer foods, not eating out at restauraunts, driving a used car, not upgrading your home theater and computer yearly, not going on cruises, and not goofing off at work. Not buying pills for minor things like depression. Not owning a second car. Becaue the competition is willing to do this and more. So you can evolve...or die.
The Register had an article on this. At the bottom was a bit by the article author saying that when Sendo started the MS deal, the author asked them whether MS might just take their code and run, given that Sendo is just a small company. Microsoft had had a pretty solid history of doing this by this oint. Sendo said that no, MS wouldn't do anything like that.
it took from 1988 to 1998 to get a first release with 200 engineers working on it.
The first release of NT (3.1) was in '93, not '98.
Maybe through something like a GPL for patents ?
There are those of us that have one major issue with the GPL -- the amount of trust one is forced to put in the FSF. The FSF now has enormous intellectual property power by having the ability to revise the license on a very large amount of software.
Now, maybe the FSF is "okay" for a couple years. Or maybe Stallman decides to give special favors to companies that donate large amounts of money to the FSF (the idea has already been batted around). Fifty years from now, unless the GPL flops, it will be enormously influential and powerful. Stallman will likely be dead, and a new generation or two will have passed through the organization. Do you trust the FSF to have that much power a few years down the road? Especially when it becomes *worth* it to bribe an FSF member with a few million dollars?
The FSF is the single point of failure of the GPL. Sure, you can do what Linus does and use "GPL v2 only", but very, very few people do so.
Anyway, patents would be even more nasty. If a viral-style license was produced, where you could use any FSF-owned patents as long as you also donate any other patents used on a project to the FSF, you have an *incredibly* quickly growing virus. It's *very* hard to avoid infrining a huge body of patents (unlike copyright, where you just avoid copying any GPLed code).
I had no idea you read Slashdot, Rik.
Here's a weird and worrisome trademark case.
:-)
Ick. It's a bit disturbing, and moreso the fact that there are apparently a number of other landmarks that are trademarked.
I strongly suspect that, even had the appeals court been able to find that the image of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had strong commercial associations, the use the photographer made of the trademark would have been deemed legitimate.
My guess is that the court just wanted the strongest grounds possible to throw out the ruling. They didn't need to debate whether trademarking a building was legitimate, because the photographer wasn't infringing under even conventional trademark issues. They are not required to list all the reasons a previous ruling might have been invalid.
I'll let you know.
I'm not formally an IP guy either, though I like talking about it. :-)
It would be very difficult to patent a copyright or a trademark, because you need to patent a *process*, not just an image. A patent on an invention wouldn't even protect an image containing a blueprint of that invention, since information on patented devices can be exchanged freely -- it's just that the patent devices can't actually be produced.
The fourth prong of IP, trade secrets, doesn't apply either, because both trademarks and patents must be registered and publically available, which would invalidate a piece of information's trade secret status.
I think you could have a copyrighted document that contained information protected as a trade secret. However, they could be separated -- producing a (different) work describing the trade secret would violate only the trade secret law, not copyright law.
Microsoft's strategy seems to be to extract all the cash from universities that the market will bear, without starting a rebellion.
So they're operating correctly for a company in a free-market environment?