While it is debatable that this is how they think unconsciously, I seriously doubt that they are "readily admitting" what you say... even privately. Perhaps you are paraphrasing wrong? Maybe they suggested that you include "big words" that you didn't really understand yourself so you took that to mean that they think you should make your papers "confusing."
Seeing as how you use "it is debatable" "I seriously doubt" "perhaps" "maybe" "took that to mean" and I used "they will readily admit" I don't think I am the one making assumptions.
Teach someone a simplified version of something and they'll learn a simplified version or they'll think it is a simple topic. Take quantum theory for example. There's plenty of simplified quantum theories flying around popular culture right now and all of them are so far from the actual theories that they're more or less just myths that fill trashy pop-sci magazines like Wired. The fact it is a Wired editor that is complaining about Wikipedia is particularly amusing, BTW. If I were a wikipedia author, I might take it as a compliment that Wired was criticizing my writing for being too hard to understand.
There is a difference between a simplified version that hides facts and a simplified explanation that just makes all the facts easier to understand.
Or maybe the subjects really are that difficult (without the stupid quotes). Imagine that. Subjects that require years of dedicated study to understand. Subjects that trashy pop-sci magazines and dumbed down Wikipedia articles will get wrong every time.
You must have never had a bad teacher/professor if you don't believe that subjects can be made more difficult than they really are.
Many PhDs are not geniuses. Once you step outside their little realm of expertise they can often seem no more intelligent than a smart undergrad. It's the old adage that they know more and more about less and less. Often the paper you are writing is going to be judged (for various reasons) by someone who is not a professional in your own specific field. These are the people that my superiors are aiming to impress because it can be the difference between publication/patent disclosure/conference submission. It IS dumb that this is the way it is, having to impress someone who is not even inclined to understand what you are doing. That is one of the flaws in the current system.
This is a problem across all academics, not just wikipedia. I write research papers and I get criticized by those above me if they don't "sound" sufficiently intelligent. They won't say it publicly, but privately they will readily admit that the more confusion you add to the paper by using big words and clumping them together in obtuse ways will make the paper seem more professional. Also adding mathematical equations that a purposely very abstract and hard to understand are good, rather than bad. It drives me nuts personally, as I agree with the author of this article that the simpler something is to understand the better it is, especially when you are trying to TEACH someone that thing.
It is not just a science problem either. Look at literature where some of the literary works are written in such an obtuse way that people just consider them genius works because they can't understand them.
I have often thought of making it a lifelong goal to change this and simplify the way they teach many "difficult" subjects. However, the current way is way too ingrained into every part of academics that it would take a miracle to accomplish it.
I have been working in IBM Research for the last year and have witnessed a lot of the bad and a lot of the good I heard about IBM while outside it. I have witnessed the shift in IBM to Software and Services. One person in my group is from India and he talks occasionally about the plants IBM opens there employing like 50,000 people in one plant. They are nearly all entry level and the turnover rate is high due to their bad education systems.
About IBM, the bad and the good that I have witnessed.
The Bad:
There are plenty of clueless people in charge making the decisions for everyone else. There are plenty of brilliant people working in IBM, but they are put on the same level and sometimes even a lower level than others. Many phds are not allowed to actually do their research, but instead are used to try and create ways to keep existing, flawed, processes going. They are also pushing many people into the "Services" side and they occasionally treat people who are not part of that "next big thing" like crap. When I started the group I am in had 6 very smart phds from premier programs in their field. We lost one to retirement and IBM would not allow for a replacement. Another was forced into the "Services" end but instead just quit and is working for another company. Now we are down to 4 and the others who have been there a lot longer than I have are very frustrated at IBM basically telling them they are not important because they are not part of this "next big wave".
The Good:
If you are lucky enough to get in the right groups that have money IBM is a great place to research ideas. Also, IBM has made many advances that are not talked about widely so that one post about IBM only getting a couple things right and pushing them to the extreme is bogus. IBM issues more patents per year than most countries and they generate billions from those patents. I was told (don't know if it is for sure a fact) that IBM makes more money from the PS3 and from the XBOX360 than Microsoft or Sony. You hear about IBM being involved with the PS3 because of the cell processor, but most people would be surprised to hear that IBM did a lot of the work for the XBOX360 as well.
Normally applicants are decided based on experience, yet here it seems that experience could work against you since they want to introduce people to open source and not fund those that have already worked on it. It seems like the best application would be I have this great coding ability and desire but haven't done anything with it which is kind of contradictory. Am I wrong in this?
The fault in the software is that to change the password it requires no "hidden" information. Name, birthdate, and social security are not all that hidden especially on a college campus where they are thrown around daily.
In most cases where you forget your password they send it to your e-mail address. Why do they not do that in this case? If they had done that the girl would not have access to it since she never did know his password.
Saying this is not a fault in the software is to save face, but people will know.
Ok, this is a jump and it's surely not the ONLY reason, but I wonder how much the publicity from pirated movies/music has encouraged people to get broadband to try it? I knew many people that never even considered downloading movies online (or new of bit torrent) until the big MPAA pub over it. Now they are all pridefully exchanging the best torrent sites they have found for it.
The Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) will today launch a legal attack on BitTorrent users in a bid to prevent ripped DVDs being shared across the network.
You can bet your big fat Association that the abbreviation was fully intended.
You'll hear this a lot on this thread, but this is NOT just in the game industry. This is a problem with software jobs everywhere and it is only getting worse. Companies use job outsourcing to strike fear into employees and scare them into working incredibly wrong hours.
EA is correct when they say their are plenty of people willing to take their job if they can't handle it. This is because many still have the wrong impression about the computer science industry. A lot of people still think it is the booming place of the mid-late 90's when you did your 40-50 hours of work and came home a rich and happy man. Instead of the now when you work 60 hours a week and come home miserable.
I hopped into the CS degree program at my university at the late stages of the bubble. I was 2 years too late and am suffering for it. I was pretty much forced into graduate school because of a bad internship and bad stories from those I know in the field. 60 hour weeks are the norm and overtime is required rather than requested. It is a very psychologically damaging profession and unless someone in the government takes charge (which is quite unlikely with the corp-friendly republicans in charge now) a lot of people will suffer.
Many suggest unions as a solution, but it is almost a no-win situation. If you make it tough for the employers then they will just outsource more and instead of you doing the heavy overtime they'll make some guy in India do it a little more willingly. What is necessary is a widespread teaching by people in the industry of what programming entails and WHY you can't force unreasonable deadlines. Right now those that want the programs have no clue of the effort that goes into it. These are the people that think html is as difficult as programming gets.
There is so much more to this, but I'm not in the mood to write an essay so I'll stop now.
Not only is this study biased towards universities that include new computers in the tuition (which is dumb since if I need a computer I'll get one if I don't I don't want to be forced to, but those that do decide to get a computer aren't included in the computer to student ratio), but it is also full of wrong information. Here is an example of where I go to grad school
It says the school does not supply web pages. This is bull crap since I've had a website on the school server for over a year. Plus it explains right here on state's own server HOW to set up your web page.
As stated by others this is far from being a new idea and is definitely not restricted to games.
Blogs are great because people attribute them to being by "average" people like you or me. I think this will change since a lot of famous people are now blogging, but for now that is still the perception.
So you get an average schmo who tries this product and raves about it for weeks on his blog and it seems a lot more truthful than the usual advertisements which we are used to being full of BS. I remember the first blog ad I saw was for one of those penis-enlargement schemes. The guy went through the product for 6 weeks. It was very well detailed about when and how it helped him. They even did the smart thing by having him doubt that the product was going to work and then completely wowed when it did work. Now testimonials are nothing new in advertising, but I like said we are USED to it in commercials and other ads. We are NOT used to it in blogs so it rings true. This will eventually change.
(and no, I didn't get the penis enlargement thing. and pure curiousity would be the answer for those questions as to how I saw it in the first place:p. I drive a toyota camry so I'm fine with my family jewels. No need for hummers here!)
HAHA. When I first read the title I thought it said G5 Porn and thought it was funny because you know "HAHA it looks like porn". Then I looked at it the second time, saw that it still said G5 porn. Then instead of laughing I conjured up images some of the mac zealots in my college closing the door, turning off the lights, and lubing up usb port. Now I can't get it out of my head. Someone shoot me.
I remember the last time....a brazilian was in the lead with only a couple functions left. Then out of nowhere a drunk irishman with the words
"I use FreeBSD you insensitive clods!"
written on his back ran onto the floor and shoved the leader's chair into the crowd. Scooting the chair back into place cost the leader precious seconds and momentum which dropped him eventually to third place.
I for one welcome our new hi-def amateur porn overlords.
On a serious note. I have been thinking about things like this for a while. It's not exactly a highly original thought, but more and more of high end hardware/software/electronics/mechanics are becoming available to the normal joe. This has been widely known and considered with apache/linux/mysql/php/etc., but it is happening in many realms other than software.
I think that we are stepping into a creative boon as a result of this. When only large profit-intensive, single-minded corporations have access to these types of materials you don't see much creativity in how they are used. However, you stick that power with a vast majority of the public and you are going to have some incredibly original and creative ideas. I am looking forward to the creativity too....Doggy style is so 20th century.
I still remember (and cringe when doing so) my software engineering class in college. SE is over-analyzed to a fault. You have so many "improvements" like UML and programs like Rational Rose that only help to overwork and confuse those working on programs. And don't even get me started on the bazillion buzzwords created for software engineering just to make obvious facts sound scientific.
I think a book like this is what is wholly necessary. I am not saying this book does a good job of it (I haven't read it). There just needs to be a book that tells people how much of the software engineering information is false and unnecessary. This is so we don't have to either sift through all of it or even worse waste countless hours trying to follow a faulty discipline.
Yea I have an agenda because writing software is hard enough in itself. It is 10 times worse when cluttered with overhead. I remember my very first programming class in high school (it was at a community college) where I was told for a FACT that I should flowchart every function and include a separate box for every line of code. It is ridiculous and they are feeding this stuff into students heads as fact.
I tried to use this to run games. It didn't work at first, there just wasn't enough power. Then I used the gravitational pull of my neighbor's house as a slingshot and was running Doom 3 in no time.
"When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?"
The second it became sponsored by someone out for a profit and not for the knowledge.
The MPAA is sure not winning fans and have learned from the RIAA the art of looking in the wrong direction. LOTR dvd sales alone are probably enough for a profit and everyone knows the incredible amounts of money it made at the box office. Then you realize that typically LOTR fans are geeks, and tend to be the ones that WOULD download a movie on the internet. This should lead to the conclusion that piracy doesn't mean much even if it IS as prevalent as they want you to think (even though it isn't). And what the hell is with the ads AT the movie theaters telling the people who BOUGHT A FREAKING TICKET TO THE MOVIE that it's wrong to pirate.
Instead what they like to do is include the stats for the amount of geeks downloading LOTR, then combine it with the box office busts like Catwoman and say "See! People aren't seeing movies because they can just download it." They conveniently forget the fact that watching your cat lick herself while taking a piss in the litter box is more entertaining than watching Catwoman. Hopefully someone in congress will wise up to the RIAA and MPAA games and give them a swift kick in the caboose.
So when are the first "I need a date" billboards from slashdot geeks going to appear? You can point it to your TomsADnDandStarwars.com fan page. The similarities are obvious. He only needed one liver, most geeks will settle for one girl. He needed a liver to keep on living, most geeks need one for bragging purposes at the next trekkie convention. Very similar.
Nothing like damaged pride to get the government to push along technology. Without Japan's competition this would probably not have happened. All we need is for Russia to cure a type of cancer using stem cells and congress would pass a law funding it the next day.
About obsolete motherboards I have my doubts though. The Von Neumann (may be spelled wrong) model has been around for a long time because it has proven to work and it also supplies a lot of companies with revenue. If you only have a single chip, then a lot of companies are going to lose money and they won't like that. In fact there may be a silver lining in this that it will push motherboard manufacturers even further for fear of being wiped out by this type of technology.
"The operating system that drives the airline's flight plans went down."
How in the world can they state that as singular.
Surely they have a backup of some sort. Especially with all the supposed "increased security" around air flight, you are telling me that one system crash can knock out half of the major airlines? That's ridiculous. Have they not learned about redundancy?
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.
For those grammatically declined I'll explain it to you with an analogy. It's like when you were in high school and used mirrors to peek around the corner into the girl's locker room. The naked chick in the mirror is the APPARANT horizon. The naked chick that kicks the testes back inside your body shortly after DOES NOT EXIST.
Also, just for laughs (ok...hopefully for mod points too, I admit) Hawking is also a freaking awesome DJ and serial killer on the side. All my Shootin's be driveby's
Wu's site has other cool stuff to see too. (not a plug, just want to give credit to where the song is downloaded from)
On paper this is a nice idea, allowing students to download information from their professors. In reality it is not so useful.
Many professors have still refused to adopt the internet as a way of getting information to students and Al Gore invented that over 10 years ago. Other than the CS classes and a few tech-savy professors elsewhere this won't even be attempted.
For those that do, It will take a long time for them to gather audio lectures and exactly how helpful are they without the visual aids behind them? The same is true for audio books. Technical audio books are not exactly the easiest way to learn a subject. The best use for audio books would be for literature, but as stated above, humanities professors are the ones least inclined to adopt this type of idea. Even then trying to learn the theme or symbolism from an audio book is quite hard. You can't flip back and forth as easily as you can with the written form.
My guess is that there will be a big craze and initial educational push as professors *try* to make the idea work, but after a month it will only be used by students to trade prOn and music before class starts or during lunch. Not that that's a bad thing. I am all for easier to access prOn, but for the majority the educational benefit is little.
This article provides no concrete information on the amount of money lost. The only statistic it refers to is TOTAL software piracy. Now that total number is most likely exaggerated, but even if it isn't 99.9999% of that is PC piracy. Console piracy as of now is such a small group they hardly cause a blip on the money radar.
It will never be a big chunk. Why, you ask? Because unlike PC piracy, you actually have to PAY most of the time to get a modded console. The typical pirate doesn't want to pay jack which is why they pirate. So it will always be a small audience.
Why pay $100 for a modded box when if you just wait for the games to show up on the used shelves you can get 5 great games for that same price. In my opinion used game sales has a TON more impact on publisher revenue than a modded box. That's where the publishers should be directing their attention. I own a ps2 and have not bought one single game new, yet i have almost all the great games associated with the console. So the publishers haven't gotten one cent from me.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as how you use "it is debatable" "I seriously doubt" "perhaps" "maybe" "took that to mean" and I used "they will readily admit" I don't think I am the one making assumptions.
There is a difference between a simplified version that hides facts and a simplified explanation that just makes all the facts easier to understand.
You must have never had a bad teacher/professor if you don't believe that subjects can be made more difficult than they really are.
Many PhDs are not geniuses. Once you step outside their little realm of expertise they can often seem no more intelligent than a smart undergrad. It's the old adage that they know more and more about less and less. Often the paper you are writing is going to be judged (for various reasons) by someone who is not a professional in your own specific field. These are the people that my superiors are aiming to impress because it can be the difference between publication/patent disclosure/conference submission. It IS dumb that this is the way it is, having to impress someone who is not even inclined to understand what you are doing. That is one of the flaws in the current system.
It is not just a science problem either. Look at literature where some of the literary works are written in such an obtuse way that people just consider them genius works because they can't understand them.
I have often thought of making it a lifelong goal to change this and simplify the way they teach many "difficult" subjects. However, the current way is way too ingrained into every part of academics that it would take a miracle to accomplish it.
I have been working in IBM Research for the last year and have witnessed a lot of the bad and a lot of the good I heard about IBM while outside it. I have witnessed the shift in IBM to Software and Services. One person in my group is from India and he talks occasionally about the plants IBM opens there employing like 50,000 people in one plant. They are nearly all entry level and the turnover rate is high due to their bad education systems. About IBM, the bad and the good that I have witnessed. The Bad: There are plenty of clueless people in charge making the decisions for everyone else. There are plenty of brilliant people working in IBM, but they are put on the same level and sometimes even a lower level than others. Many phds are not allowed to actually do their research, but instead are used to try and create ways to keep existing, flawed, processes going. They are also pushing many people into the "Services" side and they occasionally treat people who are not part of that "next big thing" like crap. When I started the group I am in had 6 very smart phds from premier programs in their field. We lost one to retirement and IBM would not allow for a replacement. Another was forced into the "Services" end but instead just quit and is working for another company. Now we are down to 4 and the others who have been there a lot longer than I have are very frustrated at IBM basically telling them they are not important because they are not part of this "next big wave". The Good: If you are lucky enough to get in the right groups that have money IBM is a great place to research ideas. Also, IBM has made many advances that are not talked about widely so that one post about IBM only getting a couple things right and pushing them to the extreme is bogus. IBM issues more patents per year than most countries and they generate billions from those patents. I was told (don't know if it is for sure a fact) that IBM makes more money from the PS3 and from the XBOX360 than Microsoft or Sony. You hear about IBM being involved with the PS3 because of the cell processor, but most people would be surprised to hear that IBM did a lot of the work for the XBOX360 as well.
Normally applicants are decided based on experience, yet here it seems that experience could work against you since they want to introduce people to open source and not fund those that have already worked on it. It seems like the best application would be I have this great coding ability and desire but haven't done anything with it which is kind of contradictory. Am I wrong in this?
The fault in the software is that to change the password it requires no "hidden" information. Name, birthdate, and social security are not all that hidden especially on a college campus where they are thrown around daily.
In most cases where you forget your password they send it to your e-mail address. Why do they not do that in this case? If they had done that the girl would not have access to it since she never did know his password.
Saying this is not a fault in the software is to save face, but people will know.
Ok, this is a jump and it's surely not the ONLY reason, but I wonder how much the publicity from pirated movies/music has encouraged people to get broadband to try it? I knew many people that never even considered downloading movies online (or new of bit torrent) until the big MPAA pub over it. Now they are all pridefully exchanging the best torrent sites they have found for it.
EA is correct when they say their are plenty of people willing to take their job if they can't handle it. This is because many still have the wrong impression about the computer science industry. A lot of people still think it is the booming place of the mid-late 90's when you did your 40-50 hours of work and came home a rich and happy man. Instead of the now when you work 60 hours a week and come home miserable.
I hopped into the CS degree program at my university at the late stages of the bubble. I was 2 years too late and am suffering for it. I was pretty much forced into graduate school because of a bad internship and bad stories from those I know in the field. 60 hour weeks are the norm and overtime is required rather than requested. It is a very psychologically damaging profession and unless someone in the government takes charge (which is quite unlikely with the corp-friendly republicans in charge now) a lot of people will suffer.
Many suggest unions as a solution, but it is almost a no-win situation. If you make it tough for the employers then they will just outsource more and instead of you doing the heavy overtime they'll make some guy in India do it a little more willingly. What is necessary is a widespread teaching by people in the industry of what programming entails and WHY you can't force unreasonable deadlines. Right now those that want the programs have no clue of the effort that goes into it. These are the people that think html is as difficult as programming gets. There is so much more to this, but I'm not in the mood to write an essay so I'll stop now.
North Carolina State University
It says the school does not supply web pages. This is bull crap since I've had a website on the school server for over a year. Plus it explains right here on state's own server HOW to set up your web page.
Create your own homepage
Heck, every freshman undergrad is required to take a computer class where they make their own website.
Now down to the bottom, it says the school does not provide multimedia equipment. Again, completely false. Look at this site again on ncsu.edu
Multimedia Reserve
This is why I hate school rankings like these. They are usually very misleading and often contain false information.
Blogs are great because people attribute them to being by "average" people like you or me. I think this will change since a lot of famous people are now blogging, but for now that is still the perception.
So you get an average schmo who tries this product and raves about it for weeks on his blog and it seems a lot more truthful than the usual advertisements which we are used to being full of BS. I remember the first blog ad I saw was for one of those penis-enlargement schemes. The guy went through the product for 6 weeks. It was very well detailed about when and how it helped him. They even did the smart thing by having him doubt that the product was going to work and then completely wowed when it did work. Now testimonials are nothing new in advertising, but I like said we are USED to it in commercials and other ads. We are NOT used to it in blogs so it rings true. This will eventually change.
(and no, I didn't get the penis enlargement thing. and pure curiousity would be the answer for those questions as to how I saw it in the first place :p. I drive a toyota camry so I'm fine with my family jewels. No need for hummers here!)
HAHA. When I first read the title I thought it said G5 Porn and thought it was funny because you know "HAHA it looks like porn". Then I looked at it the second time, saw that it still said G5 porn. Then instead of laughing I conjured up images some of the mac zealots in my college closing the door, turning off the lights, and lubing up usb port. Now I can't get it out of my head. Someone shoot me.
"I use FreeBSD you insensitive clods!"
written on his back ran onto the floor and shoved the leader's chair into the crowd. Scooting the chair back into place cost the leader precious seconds and momentum which dropped him eventually to third place.
On a serious note. I have been thinking about things like this for a while. It's not exactly a highly original thought, but more and more of high end hardware/software/electronics/mechanics are becoming available to the normal joe. This has been widely known and considered with apache/linux/mysql/php/etc., but it is happening in many realms other than software.
I think that we are stepping into a creative boon as a result of this. When only large profit-intensive, single-minded corporations have access to these types of materials you don't see much creativity in how they are used. However, you stick that power with a vast majority of the public and you are going to have some incredibly original and creative ideas. I am looking forward to the creativity too....Doggy style is so 20th century.
I think a book like this is what is wholly necessary. I am not saying this book does a good job of it (I haven't read it). There just needs to be a book that tells people how much of the software engineering information is false and unnecessary. This is so we don't have to either sift through all of it or even worse waste countless hours trying to follow a faulty discipline.
Yea I have an agenda because writing software is hard enough in itself. It is 10 times worse when cluttered with overhead. I remember my very first programming class in high school (it was at a community college) where I was told for a FACT that I should flowchart every function and include a separate box for every line of code. It is ridiculous and they are feeding this stuff into students heads as fact.
I tried to use this to run games. It didn't work at first, there just wasn't enough power. Then I used the gravitational pull of my neighbor's house as a slingshot and was running Doom 3 in no time.
Instead what they like to do is include the stats for the amount of geeks downloading LOTR, then combine it with the box office busts like Catwoman and say "See! People aren't seeing movies because they can just download it." They conveniently forget the fact that watching your cat lick herself while taking a piss in the litter box is more entertaining than watching Catwoman. Hopefully someone in congress will wise up to the RIAA and MPAA games and give them a swift kick in the caboose.
So when are the first "I need a date" billboards from slashdot geeks going to appear? You can point it to your TomsADnDandStarwars.com fan page. The similarities are obvious. He only needed one liver, most geeks will settle for one girl. He needed a liver to keep on living, most geeks need one for bragging purposes at the next trekkie convention. Very similar.
About obsolete motherboards I have my doubts though. The Von Neumann (may be spelled wrong) model has been around for a long time because it has proven to work and it also supplies a lot of companies with revenue. If you only have a single chip, then a lot of companies are going to lose money and they won't like that. In fact there may be a silver lining in this that it will push motherboard manufacturers even further for fear of being wiped out by this type of technology.
How in the world can they state that as singular. Surely they have a backup of some sort. Especially with all the supposed "increased security" around air flight, you are telling me that one system crash can knock out half of the major airlines? That's ridiculous. Have they not learned about redundancy?
For those grammatically declined I'll explain it to you with an analogy. It's like when you were in high school and used mirrors to peek around the corner into the girl's locker room. The naked chick in the mirror is the APPARANT horizon. The naked chick that kicks the testes back inside your body shortly after DOES NOT EXIST.
Also, just for laughs (ok...hopefully for mod points too, I admit) Hawking is also a freaking awesome DJ and serial killer on the side. All my Shootin's be driveby's
Wu's site has other cool stuff to see too. (not a plug, just want to give credit to where the song is downloaded from)
Many professors have still refused to adopt the internet as a way of getting information to students and Al Gore invented that over 10 years ago. Other than the CS classes and a few tech-savy professors elsewhere this won't even be attempted.
For those that do, It will take a long time for them to gather audio lectures and exactly how helpful are they without the visual aids behind them? The same is true for audio books. Technical audio books are not exactly the easiest way to learn a subject. The best use for audio books would be for literature, but as stated above, humanities professors are the ones least inclined to adopt this type of idea. Even then trying to learn the theme or symbolism from an audio book is quite hard. You can't flip back and forth as easily as you can with the written form.
My guess is that there will be a big craze and initial educational push as professors *try* to make the idea work, but after a month it will only be used by students to trade prOn and music before class starts or during lunch. Not that that's a bad thing. I am all for easier to access prOn, but for the majority the educational benefit is little.
This article provides no concrete information on the amount of money lost. The only statistic it refers to is TOTAL software piracy. Now that total number is most likely exaggerated, but even if it isn't 99.9999% of that is PC piracy. Console piracy as of now is such a small group they hardly cause a blip on the money radar.
It will never be a big chunk. Why, you ask? Because unlike PC piracy, you actually have to PAY most of the time to get a modded console. The typical pirate doesn't want to pay jack which is why they pirate. So it will always be a small audience.
Why pay $100 for a modded box when if you just wait for the games to show up on the used shelves you can get 5 great games for that same price. In my opinion used game sales has a TON more impact on publisher revenue than a modded box. That's where the publishers should be directing their attention. I own a ps2 and have not bought one single game new, yet i have almost all the great games associated with the console. So the publishers haven't gotten one cent from me.