I've heard several people say their company has done exactly this. Actually, even worse - they had already hired the H1B and then had that person write the job requirements themselves, so that they were the only one qualified.
Not the lawsuits, but the hiring of H1B's over US Citizens. I work in a small company (no, not the one linked to in my URL) and there are maybe 15 coders in our office.
Three of them are US Citizens. I am one of them.
Anecedotal evidence.
I worked in a company for four years and they never had more then 12 employees at a time. We NEVER hired a non-US citizen. Several times we considered some foreigners, but never actually hired any.
My current company is mega-huge (over 70,000 employees). Of the 11 programmers in the group I work with, only 2 are foreign born, and I believe they both have US citizenship. There is another half to the group that does the web-stuff, and they also about 11 or 12 programmers, of which there are no H1B people there either.
So there you go - you guys work in places where most of the people are H1B, I've never worked in a group with ANY H1B people. Course, I'm in da south...:-p
There are plenty of people in Afganistan; I'm sure many are qualified to do your job at a mere fraction of what you're being paid.
Yep, those afghanis a threatening to take all the IT jobs away from US geeks. Considering they haven't had internet access since the Taliban took over. Not to worry though, almost nobody there could have afforded a computer anyways. And where would they plug it in? "Hey Akbar - let's wire up the ol' cave for electricity tonight!"
Don't know what you're talking about - my home PC is over four years old and still chugging along just fine. I've added some stuff to it, but have not had a single thing break on it.
In fact, in terms of personal ownership, I have only ever owned three computers and I've been at it for over 20 years. And one of those three was a C-64... The other two were PCs, one of which I gave to my sister when I wanted to upgrade my game playing capability. So, I'd say PCs can work for year after year after year too.
Granted, in college I didn't own my own PC since I had access to X boxes and various Sparc stations and who needs a PC under those conditions...:)~
But the way it really works is... "you go on strike and you're all fired. We'll hire someone else at half the cost (maybe even a foriegner on an H1 visa!), saving us even MORE money! MUHAHAHAHA! Suckers..."
Here's where I feel like social programs that do a lot of good can work. Ditch them all at the federal level, and devolve them to the state and local level.
Ah yes, the elusive 10th amendment! How nice it would be if anybody ever paid any attention to it. Pesky things, those amendments...
Yeah, but the astronauts would probably die on the way back. You'd have to assume either the lifeforms have a long incubation period or else they can hibernate for long periods of time without a host (spores?).
But then, killing off the humans wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to this planet:-p (worst for us humans, but not for the planet)
I'd take it for free. And then hide it, driving the prices back up when people realize the market won't be flooded. Occassionally I'd take it to a gemologist to split off a few pieces that I could sell at the artifically inflated prices. As if the prices aren't already artifically inflated right now anyways...
If nothing is done then the longer lived members of our society- those that look better ('younger') for longer will have more children,
Not unless there are some radical changes in female reproductive organs, like being born with more eggs, or being able to produce an unlimited number of eggs as men do sperm.
How apropos - after reading a bit of this thread, I check my email and lo, I received this email:
from http://www.costik.com/weblog/
The mood at the Game Developers Conference this year was, fundamentally, one of despair. To even the blindest apologist for the silly, if monstrous, construct the game industry has become, the handwriting on the wall was clear. Ten years ago, you could find a dozen publishers to pitch to; today, perhaps five. And of the remaining, half are on their last legs: the Vivendi Universal game group will almost certainly be in someone else's hands by the end of the year, Infogrames is fucked, Activision is screwed, 3DO is tottering, Acclaim is in dire straits. The only companies with evident strength are the manufacturers--Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft (included on this list not because they make any money in games, but because they have deep pockets)--and EA, despite the fact that it has utterly failed to make a go of online gaming which, two scant years ago, they claimed was the future. (And it is, but EA is too fucking stupid to listen to those of its employees who understand how online gaming works, and instead try to make it work like its sports game franchise. Which it doesn't and never will.)
Year by year, budgets increase. Year by year, sales increase less. And year by year, the publishers become more conservative; at $3m a pop and a 3 year dev cycle, it's too risky to invest in any game that's--risky. Thus only sequels and licensed drivel get funded.
Year by year, independent developers disappear. The lucky ones get acquired; the unlucky ones simply go under. Their only hope of funding is to bid on a sequel or a licensed product--and the reality is that doing that crap is cheaper in, say, Eastern Europe. It takes no creativity to do III in a series, or a game based on a movie that innovates only by appliqueing movie characters to a successful game style; that takes no creativity, and underpaid coders in Romania suffice.
Never mind the self-evident fact that the industry's real hits have always been innovative, always been out of left field--SimCity, Balance of Power, Command & Conquer, Deer Hunter, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims. Licenses and sequels are perceived as less risky. No one ever got fired for greenlighting a Major League Baseball game, or something licensed from a Hollywood hit, or game IV in a series that's always sold. Pick wrong on an innovative title, and you're history.
And so the walls come closing in. You have to be fuckin' Will Wright to get an innovative title through; no one else can do it. (Okay, Miyamoto can do it. Maybe Sid Meier. But you get the drift.)
Fewer and fewer titles are commissioned from independent developers; the publishers gobble up studios, until they themselves fail, because they don't have the publishing spread (or, in many cases, the brains god gave a biscuit) to compete with the largest houses.
The industry is fucked. It's less imaginative, more risk averse, than the fucking music business. It makes Hollywood look happy to take a flyer on talent.
Mene mene takel upharsin. The writing is on the wall. And here we have my high-school buddy Warren Spector to confirm it: There in his keynote speech, telling us not to worry, just be happy. Drink the cool aid. Go to work for an in-house studio. Develop a licensed product. By God, Warren would be glad to do a Harry Potter game. What a lovely universe to work in. It's the future. It's the way things are. And it's not so bad.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend. Honest.
Desperation breeds--sometimes despair, but at least as often, desperate innovation.
Some years ago, in a piece in Game Developer, I said that gaming needs an independent label, something analogous to independent music labels or independent film, to provide an alternative distribution channel for games that challenge the conventional wisdom, allow experimentation on smaller budgets, and can serve to reinvigorate the mainstream. The basic idea is true--but we live in a different world, and conventional retail, even if through slightly different retailers, may not be the answer.
Here's what I observed at GDC:
I went to a session entitled Proven Strategies for Self-Publishing on the Internet. Two years ago, it would have been empty. This year, the room was so full that conference associates had to keep on harassing people to keep an aisle clear, presumably in case of fire and panic. Panelists from companies like Pop Cap and The Groove Alliance say they're making real money through places like Real Arcade and Shockwave.com. Panelists say they think that downloadable shareware games like theirs will generate somewhere between $70m and $100m in 2003.
Now most of this stuff is drivel, although some of it is highly addictive puzzled games like Bejeweled that can't find a place at retail today, and bully for them that they've found a marketing venue that works. And in all likelihood, this marketing channel has its own strong forces that prevent any real creativity--instant-pickup games with no real depth. But still; this is starting to look like real money, without dealing with the twits in Redwood City, and developers are lapping it up.
They just want so badly to find a way out.
Or look it at the crowds around the Independent Game Festival finalists. That's a bunch of machines on the showroom floor, with representatives of the finalists demoing their titles. The IGF is basically open to any game that doesn't have a publishing contract, and hundreds of hopefuls submit titles every year (every year of the five it's been running) hoping for a little glory--and a shot at a publishing contract with one of the majors. Never mind that no IGF title has ever gone on to major publication and success. It's one of the few ways a garage operation can hope for a shot at glory.
So sad--and yet--look at all the people crowded around those demo machines. It wasn't like this last year. Or the year before. Three years ago, the demo machines were a virtual wasteland--and the IGF finalists were so happy when I'd stop by to ask them about their games. This year, I can't even get close enough to play--sometimes not even close enough to get a glimpse over the shoulders of the throngs about the machines.
They're this desperate--this desperate for the hope of a little innovation, a little chance to do something real, a little chance to reach an audience. These 10,000 geeks (that's what CMP Game Media claims was the attendance), most of them professionals, would just love to do what the IGF guys are doing--do a game for chrissakes, work on something you believe in, not churn out the next big-budget piece of crap.
Then we have the Experimental Games Workshop. It's so crowded they open all the doors so people standing out in the hall can pogo high enough to catch a glimpse of the screen and see the games they're demoing. The highlight is, as I expect, the Indie Games Jam (about which more in another post)--although I also very much like the entry from some Japanese guy whose name I don't catch, who has something he claims is PSII email software that plays like some bizarre rap dancer with a synthesized voice rapping the text you enter, and a character bopping about swishing a Japanese calligraphic paintbrush and spattering virtual ink about the page--I have no idea what this thing is, but it makes every game I've played this year look tired.
Why are all these guys here? This isn't even a channel. These games were never created with anything approaching commercial intent. We're supposed to be cynical industry fucks, not a bunch of starry-eyed artistic dweebs.
But we're all so desperate for something real, something creative, not the same old same old same gold crap. Tony Hawk LXIX. Hollywood Blockbuster XII. Army Men XXIII. Coasters of Might and Magic.
And even.... even... at Nokia's sponsored Developing for N-Gage sessions, the room is jammed--despite the doubts about Nokia, the doubts about N-Gage, the feeling that even if it works, it's just another console shell-game, another route to the same dull uniformity. It is something new, a little different; maybe there's still opportunity to do something real here, maybe there's a route in, maybe it won't be Tony Hawk Mobile Edition and James Bond 007 for Bluetooth--maybe Nokia means what it says when it talks about "enabling new game styles" through connected mobility.
Though that sure does sound like the same old corporate drivel, doesn't it? Connected mobility, forsooth.
It's not just N-Gage, in fact. Mobile is on the tip of everyone's tongue. Is it real? If so, when? And how much? And what's the business opportunity? Where does it lie? And (in Glenn Broadway's language), will retro gaming kill it? Does it really all have to be Asteroids recloned?
There's something going on here. Exactly what, I cannot say. Where it leads, I have no idea. But there was a palpable sense of frustration at this year's GDC, a feeling that the walls are closing in--and that something has to change. Somehow. Somewhere.
The game is a virtually infinitely plastic medium; it's adaptable to every technology from the neolithic on. Digital games have explored a tiny fraction of the possible--particularly tiny because of their (up until recently) inherently single-player nature. Inexorable business forces--fuelled at least as much by the lack of imagination of publishers as their risk averseness--have nonetheless squeezed the range of the commercially possible down to a few hackneyed lines. Yet at the same time, developers have become far more aware of the potential, far more respectful of their own history and the promise it held, far more educated about the possibilities of design--and consequently far more frustrated at the narrowing paths into which their talents are channelled.
A specter is haunting gaming--the specter of its own oblivion.
But gaming is young, and restless, and not ready to die.
Redwood City is tense; the king and queen go about their affairs, oblivious to the public mood. But angry men congregate in the public squares, and harangue the passers by.
Then again, if people are cracking your software, it means they actually like it enough to bother. That's an understated compliment:-)
It doesn't pay your bills, but should enhance your company's reputation for producing software people actually want. Reputation is certainly worth something.
The universe being ripped apart would leave what in its place?
Perhaps the resulting emptiness could then undergo another big bang and create yet another universe? Wouldn't that be neat.
Or not. I guess we'll never know!
Re:Notes from Underground
on
Funding New Games
·
· Score: 3, Informative
What you need to do is take a good solid demo (that is to say, a game that is basically is beta stage) to a small but professional development house (such as... HDI and see if they wouldn't be interested in helping you finish and publish it.
HDI reviews outside development stuff (not just computer games, but board games too) with an to publishing, so they would be more then happy to give you a fair shake.
Uh, no. Most official game testers I've ever known don't have any programming skills, and they sure as heck don't have access to the source code for a project.
Small development houses working independently may operate in a different manner, but in general...
There is one downside that makes it less fun, more tedious, and more like a job then a vacation - you've got to play the SAME GAME over and over and over and over and over...
If it's a fun game, that's no problem, but how many games out there do you REALLY want to play for 80 hours a week for a month or two solid? I can't think of very many. You'd get sick of it in a real hurry.
Pascal Users: The Pascal system will be replaced next Tuesday by Cobol. Please modify your programs accordingly.
---- No doubt if you were on the same team and someone wrote a function to work around a bug (rather than finding it and fixing it) you'd be in a world of hurt, too. It's possible, but it's no more possible now than it was before.
If I wrote a function that didn't do bounds checking on a passed-by-reference array before it returned it, and it overran array bounds, there's no possible work around possible. It WILL bomb. Maybe not right away, but it will eventually. If he wants to modify my function to check array bounds, there will be a great big visual footprint of such modification, either new code or a new function call or a new preprocessor directive or SOMETHING. With an aspect, there's nothing in there to clue me in that there was an error.
And the preprocessor analogy isn't quite apropos, because with preprocessor directives you see something in the code that tells you something is happening at that point. It sounds like with aspects you don't get any corresponding cue in the code.
Perl does automagically fix stuff - overrun an array bounds? No problem, it just grows the array to be big enough. Use an array in a scalar context? No problem! (well, there is, but there is well defined behavior for this case so it does that and keeps going like nothing happened). I've written perl programs where it did the Right Thing even though I wrote the code in the wrong way. That can be pretty scary, but its ability to silently fix and keep going is what makes that possible.
Slashdot Mirror
David Grinspoon says: First let me say that I am a big fan of carbon-based life. Some of my best friends are carbon-based.
I'd sure hope so...
I've heard several people say their company has done exactly this. Actually, even worse - they had already hired the H1B and then had that person write the job requirements themselves, so that they were the only one qualified.
Not the lawsuits, but the hiring of H1B's over US Citizens. I work in a small company (no, not the one linked to in my URL) and there are maybe 15 coders in our office.
:-p
Three of them are US Citizens. I am one of them.
Anecedotal evidence.
I worked in a company for four years and they never had more then 12 employees at a time. We NEVER hired a non-US citizen. Several times we considered some foreigners, but never actually hired any.
My current company is mega-huge (over 70,000 employees). Of the 11 programmers in the group I work with, only 2 are foreign born, and I believe they both have US citizenship. There is another half to the group that does the web-stuff, and they also about 11 or 12 programmers, of which there are no H1B people there either.
So there you go - you guys work in places where most of the people are H1B, I've never worked in a group with ANY H1B people. Course, I'm in da south...
Obviously they aren't beachballs, they are SpaceBalls!
There are plenty of people in Afganistan; I'm sure many are qualified to do your job at a mere fraction of what you're being paid.
Yep, those afghanis a threatening to take all the IT jobs away from US geeks. Considering they haven't had internet access since the Taliban took over. Not to worry though, almost nobody there could have afforded a computer anyways. And where would they plug it in? "Hey Akbar - let's wire up the ol' cave for electricity tonight!"
Don't know what you're talking about - my home PC is over four years old and still chugging along just fine. I've added some stuff to it, but have not had a single thing break on it.
:)~
In fact, in terms of personal ownership, I have only ever owned three computers and I've been at it for over 20 years. And one of those three was a C-64... The other two were PCs, one of which I gave to my sister when I wanted to upgrade my game playing capability. So, I'd say PCs can work for year after year after year too.
Granted, in college I didn't own my own PC since I had access to X boxes and various Sparc stations and who needs a PC under those conditions...
Didn't Reagen do it? While president? (to air traffic controllers) Or is this a newer law?
But the way it really works is... "you go on strike and you're all fired. We'll hire someone else at half the cost (maybe even a foriegner on an H1 visa!), saving us even MORE money! MUHAHAHAHA! Suckers..."
Here's where I feel like social programs that do a lot of good can work. Ditch them all at the federal level, and devolve them to the state and local level.
Ah yes, the elusive 10th amendment! How nice it would be if anybody ever paid any attention to it. Pesky things, those amendments...
America is a super-power in the world not because of its military , rather because of its economic dominance.
Try telling that to Iraq....
Economy without military doesn't make a superpower any more then military without economy does. You gotta have both to be dominant.
Yeah, but the astronauts would probably die on the way back. You'd have to assume either the lifeforms have a long incubation period or else they can hibernate for long periods of time without a host (spores?).
:-p
But then, killing off the humans wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to this planet
(worst for us humans, but not for the planet)
I sure wish I had some mod points, cause I find myself laughing out loud :-D
:-p
Ok, so a two mile wide diamond might be a bit tricky to hide...
I'd take it for free. And then hide it, driving the prices back up when people realize the market won't be flooded. Occassionally I'd take it to a gemologist to split off a few pieces that I could sell at the artifically inflated prices. As if the prices aren't already artifically inflated right now anyways...
da Beers, here comes the competition!
Now watch my karma go down in flames.
;-p
Sounds like your karma just ran over some Christian's dogma
If nothing is done then the longer lived members of our society- those that look better ('younger') for longer will have more children,
Not unless there are some radical changes in female reproductive organs, like being born with more eggs, or being able to produce an unlimited number of eggs as men do sperm.
I wanna live as long as possible just so I see how badly humans screw everything up :-p
How apropos - after reading a bit of this thread, I check my email and lo, I received this email:
from http://www.costik.com/weblog/
The mood at the Game Developers Conference this year was, fundamentally, one of despair. To even the blindest apologist for the silly, if monstrous, construct the game industry has become, the handwriting on the wall was clear. Ten years ago, you could find a dozen publishers to pitch to; today, perhaps five. And of the remaining, half are on their last legs: the Vivendi Universal game group will almost certainly be in someone else's hands by the end of the year, Infogrames is fucked, Activision is screwed, 3DO is tottering, Acclaim is in dire straits. The only companies with evident strength are the manufacturers--Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft (included on this list not because they make any money in games, but because they have deep pockets)--and EA, despite the fact that it has utterly failed to make a go of online gaming which, two scant years ago, they claimed was the future. (And it is, but EA is too fucking stupid to listen to those of its employees who understand how online gaming works, and instead try to make it work like its sports game franchise. Which it doesn't and never will.)
Year by year, budgets increase. Year by year, sales increase less. And year by year, the publishers become more conservative; at $3m a pop and a 3 year dev cycle, it's too risky to invest in any game that's--risky. Thus only sequels and licensed drivel get funded.
Year by year, independent developers disappear. The lucky ones get acquired; the unlucky ones simply go under. Their only hope of funding is to bid on a sequel or a licensed product--and the reality is that doing that crap is cheaper in, say, Eastern Europe. It takes no creativity to do III in a series, or a game based on a movie that innovates only by appliqueing movie characters to a successful game style; that takes no creativity, and underpaid coders in Romania suffice.
Never mind the self-evident fact that the industry's real hits have always been innovative, always been out of left field--SimCity, Balance of Power, Command & Conquer, Deer Hunter, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims. Licenses and sequels are perceived as less risky. No one ever got fired for greenlighting a Major League Baseball game, or something licensed from a Hollywood hit, or game IV in a series that's always sold. Pick wrong on an innovative title, and you're history.
And so the walls come closing in. You have to be fuckin' Will Wright to get an innovative title through; no one else can do it. (Okay, Miyamoto can do it. Maybe Sid Meier. But you get the drift.)
Fewer and fewer titles are commissioned from independent developers; the publishers gobble up studios, until they themselves fail, because they don't have the publishing spread (or, in many cases, the brains god gave a biscuit) to compete with the largest houses.
The industry is fucked. It's less imaginative, more risk averse, than the fucking music business. It makes Hollywood look happy to take a flyer on talent.
Mene mene takel upharsin. The writing is on the wall. And here we have my high-school buddy Warren Spector to confirm it: There in his keynote speech, telling us not to worry, just be happy. Drink the cool aid. Go to work for an in-house studio. Develop a licensed product. By God, Warren would be glad to do a Harry Potter game. What a lovely universe to work in. It's the future. It's the way things are. And it's not so bad.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend. Honest.
Desperation breeds--sometimes despair, but at least as often, desperate innovation.
Some years ago, in a piece in Game Developer, I said that gaming needs an independent label, something analogous to independent music labels or independent film, to provide an alternative distribution channel for games that challenge the conventional wisdom, allow experimentation on smaller budgets, and can serve to reinvigorate the mainstream. The basic idea is true--but we live in a different world, and conventional retail, even if through slightly different retailers, may not be the answer.
Here's what I observed at GDC:
I went to a session entitled Proven Strategies for Self-Publishing on the Internet. Two years ago, it would have been empty. This year, the room was so full that conference associates had to keep on harassing people to keep an aisle clear, presumably in case of fire and panic. Panelists from companies like Pop Cap and The Groove Alliance say they're making real money through places like Real Arcade and Shockwave.com. Panelists say they think that downloadable shareware games like theirs will generate somewhere between $70m and $100m in 2003.
Now most of this stuff is drivel, although some of it is highly addictive puzzled games like Bejeweled that can't find a place at retail today, and bully for them that they've found a marketing venue that works. And in all likelihood, this marketing channel has its own strong forces that prevent any real creativity--instant-pickup games with no real depth. But still; this is starting to look like real money, without dealing with the twits in Redwood City, and developers are lapping it up.
They just want so badly to find a way out.
Or look it at the crowds around the Independent Game Festival finalists. That's a bunch of machines on the showroom floor, with representatives of the finalists demoing their titles. The IGF is basically open to any game that doesn't have a publishing contract, and hundreds of hopefuls submit titles every year (every year of the five it's been running) hoping for a little glory--and a shot at a publishing contract with one of the majors. Never mind that no IGF title has ever gone on to major publication and success. It's one of the few ways a garage operation can hope for a shot at glory.
So sad--and yet--look at all the people crowded around those demo machines. It wasn't like this last year. Or the year before. Three years ago, the demo machines were a virtual wasteland--and the IGF finalists were so happy when I'd stop by to ask them about their games. This year, I can't even get close enough to play--sometimes not even close enough to get a glimpse over the shoulders of the throngs about the machines.
They're this desperate--this desperate for the hope of a little innovation, a little chance to do something real, a little chance to reach an audience. These 10,000 geeks (that's what CMP Game Media claims was the attendance), most of them professionals, would just love to do what the IGF guys are doing--do a game for chrissakes, work on something you believe in, not churn out the next big-budget piece of crap.
Then we have the Experimental Games Workshop. It's so crowded they open all the doors so people standing out in the hall can pogo high enough to catch a glimpse of the screen and see the games they're demoing. The highlight is, as I expect, the Indie Games Jam (about which more in another post)--although I also very much like the entry from some Japanese guy whose name I don't catch, who has something he claims is PSII email software that plays like some bizarre rap dancer with a synthesized voice rapping the text you enter, and a character bopping about swishing a Japanese calligraphic paintbrush and spattering virtual ink about the page--I have no idea what this thing is, but it makes every game I've played this year look tired.
Why are all these guys here? This isn't even a channel. These games were never created with anything approaching commercial intent. We're supposed to be cynical industry fucks, not a bunch of starry-eyed artistic dweebs.
But we're all so desperate for something real, something creative, not the same old same old same gold crap. Tony Hawk LXIX. Hollywood Blockbuster XII. Army Men XXIII. Coasters of Might and Magic.
And even.... even... at Nokia's sponsored Developing for N-Gage sessions, the room is jammed--despite the doubts about Nokia, the doubts about N-Gage, the feeling that even if it works, it's just another console shell-game, another route to the same dull uniformity. It is something new, a little different; maybe there's still opportunity to do something real here, maybe there's a route in, maybe it won't be Tony Hawk Mobile Edition and James Bond 007 for Bluetooth--maybe Nokia means what it says when it
talks about "enabling new game styles" through connected mobility.
Though that sure does sound like the same old corporate drivel, doesn't it? Connected mobility, forsooth.
It's not just N-Gage, in fact. Mobile is on the tip of everyone's tongue. Is it real? If so, when? And how much? And what's the business opportunity? Where does it lie? And (in Glenn Broadway's language), will retro gaming kill it? Does it really all have to be Asteroids recloned?
There's something going on here. Exactly what, I cannot say. Where it leads, I have no idea. But there was a palpable sense of frustration at this year's GDC, a feeling that the walls are closing in--and that something has to change. Somehow. Somewhere.
The game is a virtually infinitely plastic medium; it's adaptable to every technology from the neolithic on. Digital games have explored a tiny fraction of the possible--particularly tiny because of their (up until recently) inherently single-player nature. Inexorable business forces--fuelled at least as much by the lack of imagination of publishers as their risk averseness--have nonetheless squeezed the range of the commercially possible down to a few hackneyed lines. Yet at the same time, developers have become far more aware of the potential, far more respectful of their own history and the promise it held, far more educated about the possibilities of design--and consequently far more frustrated at the narrowing paths into which their talents are channelled.
A specter is haunting gaming--the specter of its own oblivion.
But gaming is young, and restless, and not ready to die.
Redwood City is tense; the king and queen go about their affairs, oblivious to the public mood. But angry men congregate in the public squares, and harangue the passers by.
Something is about to blow.
My home computer is just in my bedroom :-p
Then again, if people are cracking your software, it means they actually like it enough to bother. That's an understated compliment :-)
It doesn't pay your bills, but should enhance your company's reputation for producing software people actually want. Reputation is certainly worth something.
The universe being ripped apart would leave what in its place?
Perhaps the resulting emptiness could then undergo another big bang and create yet another universe? Wouldn't that be neat.
Or not. I guess we'll never know!
What you need to do is take a good solid demo (that is to say, a game that is basically is beta stage) to a small but professional development house (such as... HDI and see if they wouldn't be interested in helping you finish and publish it.
HDI reviews outside development stuff (not just computer games, but board games too) with an to publishing, so they would be more then happy to give you a fair shake.
Uh, no. Most official game testers I've ever known don't have any programming skills, and they sure as heck don't have access to the source code for a project.
Small development houses working independently may operate in a different manner, but in general...
There is one downside that makes it less fun, more tedious, and more like a job then a vacation - you've got to play the SAME GAME over and over and over and over and over...
If it's a fun game, that's no problem, but how many games out there do you REALLY want to play for 80 hours a week for a month or two solid? I can't think of very many. You'd get sick of it in a real hurry.
Zippy comment I found at the bottom of this page:
Pascal Users: The Pascal system will be replaced next Tuesday by Cobol. Please modify your programs accordingly.
----
No doubt if you were on the same team and someone wrote a function to work around a bug (rather than finding it and fixing it) you'd be in a world of hurt, too. It's possible, but it's no more possible now than it was before.
If I wrote a function that didn't do bounds checking on a passed-by-reference array before it returned it, and it overran array bounds, there's no possible work around possible. It WILL bomb.
Maybe not right away, but it will eventually. If he wants to modify my function to check array bounds, there will be a great big visual footprint of such modification, either new code or a new function call or a new preprocessor directive or SOMETHING. With an aspect, there's nothing in there to clue me in that there was an error.
And the preprocessor analogy isn't quite apropos, because with preprocessor directives you see something in the code that tells you something is happening at that point. It sounds like with aspects you don't get any corresponding cue in the code.
Perl does automagically fix stuff - overrun an array bounds? No problem, it just grows the array to be big enough. Use an array in a scalar context? No problem! (well, there is, but there is well defined behavior for this case so it does that and keeps going like nothing happened). I've written perl programs where it did the Right Thing even though I wrote the code in the wrong way. That can be pretty scary, but its ability to silently fix and keep going is what makes that possible.
Also, how does it interact with multi-threaded stuff?