In the sense that there's only one WoW, sure. But it's a really big one, and there are lots of lesser MMOGs that make plenty of money.
Again, that is not a market.
How the hell is that not a market? What kind of insane definition of market are you using?
The console market is approach $66 billion.
That number is way bigger than anything I've seen. Does it include hardware? Shall we also include PC hardware then?
Poor Blizzard and Valve. How will they ever survive? How about the many indie developers? It's only a handful of stupid self-destructive companies that manage to lose money on the PC.
The shelf life of PC games is much shorter and they sell half as many copies.
Half as many copies as what? There are PC games that keep selling for years. There's a webshop entirely dedicated to selling old PC games. Many older than even the previous generation of consoles.
On consoles perhaps. On PC you have a lot more variation than that.
Wrong.
Why are you even trying to argue if you don't have anything to say? You can keep saying "Wrong" as often as you like, but that doesn't make it so. If you knew even the slightest thing about PC games, I don't think you could possibly get yourself to claim something so absurd.
I admit it's a fuzzy market and it's hard to add up everything. I've also seen numbers of 17 billion and more. Keep in mind that the PC is a single platform, whereas there are 3 major console platforms. Maybe if you add them together, they're bigger than the PC market, but individually they're smaller.
You need to ignore quite a lot of the market in order to maintain the position that console games are more popular.
Speaking of that, very few companies are making money in the PC market.
Poor Blizzard and Valve. How will they ever survive? How about the many indie developers? It's only a handful of stupid self-destructive companies that manage to lose money on the PC.
That's why virtually all the games involve you being behind the sight of a gun.
On consoles perhaps. On PC you have a lot more variation than that.
I suppose you're right, but it's also employees that have changed. We switch jobs far more often than our dads did, and not just because we're fired.
In any case, my dad was also very expensive. He had a PhD and his employer (GE at the time, though it later became an independent company) originally didn't understand why he wanted to work there (my dad was unemployed at the time and just needed a job), but after they hired him, they quickly priced him out of the market, to the point that he made more money than his boss. And he was good for it. Only a few years ago, after lots of reorganizations, they wanted to fire him. It upset my dad, despite the fact that simply the severance pay would be enough to make it nearly to his retirement, but in the end they decided not to fire him, because he was simply too useful (and they wouldn't really save much money by firing him, I guess).
Anyway, my point was that he kept learning new stuff, and might continue doing that even after his retirement. Maybe he's a rare exception, but at a mere 40, any programmer that doesn't completely suck should be able to learn something new. And because of the more flexible job market, you really should learn something new regularly. That's what keeps you employable.
> 2. I'm expensive. I have 30 years of experience in the 'biz and a masters degree in CS. I'm not cheap. You could hire two 25 year olds for what I'm asking. So: Are you twice as productive as two average 25 year olds?
Quite possibly. IBM once did a study that concluded that good programmers were 10 times as productive as bad ones.
For every single job I've had so far, I had to learn one or more new languages and frameworks.
My first job fresh out of university was Visual C++, and I had no Microsoft experience (though I did have some C/C++ experience). For my second job, which was entirely Java, server-side javascript and XSLT, I was hired entirely on my C++ experience. For my third job, Ruby, I was hired entirely on my Java experience. For my current job, Groovy, I was hired for my Java and Ruby experience.
Okay, that last one makes sense, and C++ -> Java does too. But every single job requires you to learn something new. If you don't learn something new, then why did you change jobs in the first place? You're a programmer! You're supposed to be good at learning. And if you're an academically trained programmer, you're supposed to know the basic principles behind different programming paradigms, enabling you to learn languages with different paradigms quickly.
The are fundamentally different, but anyone with a good computer science education should already know the basic principles behind them, and have no problem picking them up.
Besides, a programming language that doesn't change the way you think isn't worth learning.
I have another 5 years left in the field and I'm aware of it.
You've got to be kidding me. When I read the title of this story, I thought the submitter was 60 or something. Turns out he's only 40! My dad just retired at 65. He does most of his programming in Java nowadays. You calculate how old he must have been at least when he learned that. And he's always been a programmer, for the full 40 years (or nearly that) that he worked where he did. He did have to manage the occasional project, but he's always stayed mostly on the technical side, and has always remained a programmer.
I'm 37 and seriously considering becoming a freelance programmer. I'm currently studying Scala, and have a long list of other languages I still want to learn.
As long as your mind remains nimble, you're never too old to learn or to program.
That meme has also been wrong every year. Some ignorant people were still repeating that meme when WoW was raking in over $1 billion a year on its own.
The PC game market is bigger in money than the console game market, and that's only counting games that coast money. I'm pretty sure the market for free games is also bigger on PC than on consoles. You need to ignore quite a lot of the market in order to maintain the position that console games are more popular.
How can you delegate power to the government if you can't prove you exist? Or at least that you're American? Some kind of formal proof of existence and nationality is necessary for any large democracy to function.
On the other hand, Belgium is also the country that hasn't had a central government for over a year. I get the impression some Americans would appreciate that sort of thing.
Why are people so down on angry birds? It's simple, clever, and innovative. It's the tetras of the 2010's.
And it's huge. The number of levels is enormous, as are the complexity and cleverness of many of the levels. It's also very well executed and polished.
I personally prefer 100+ hour CRPGs or strategy games, but Angry Birds is pretty amazing for what it does.
Two whole countries where practically everybody returned, and nobody elsewhere? Which two countries were those? Would be useful to know if I ever publish something for the iPhone.
Also, wouldn't it make more sense if Apple's return policy also had Apple pay back their share of the money? It's a bit strange if the developer has to pay extra for that, doesn't it? (I'd say it's a different matter if it's the developer who decides to reimburse the customer.)
A touchscreen has infinite possible variations of controls.
Yep, and they all suck total ass for almost every game out there, a few are playable... some work fine like Scrabble and Angry Birds, but anything with action sucks ass on a touch screen without tactile feedback. Even with real buttons if they don't feel right, gameplay sucks.
You're entirely correct that action games are the niche where console controllers are really useful, but there are many other genres out there where mouse, keyboard or touch screen are superior.
Nobody is saying that consoles are going away. They're awesome for party games and action games. Just don't pretend that that's all of the game market.
PC gaming was, and still is, more popular than living room console gaming.
No, it's not, and never was.
Of course it is, and it has always been.
Well, there may have been a period where consoles really were more popular than PC games, but I'm not sure when exactly that period must have been, and it's definitely over now. I suppose it also depends on how you calculate popularity. Consoles might be more popular with old, big companies, but personally I don't think that matters.
The big test here is: are there any other search engines that do this? Has Lucene implemented something similar, for example? And has Google ever made a fuss about that?
Slashdot Mirror
In the sense that there's only one WoW, sure. But it's a really big one, and there are lots of lesser MMOGs that make plenty of money.
Again, that is not a market.
How the hell is that not a market? What kind of insane definition of market are you using?
The console market is approach $66 billion.
That number is way bigger than anything I've seen. Does it include hardware? Shall we also include PC hardware then?
Poor Blizzard and Valve. How will they ever survive? How about the many indie developers? It's only a handful of stupid self-destructive companies that manage to lose money on the PC.
The shelf life of PC games is much shorter and they sell half as many copies.
Half as many copies as what? There are PC games that keep selling for years. There's a webshop entirely dedicated to selling old PC games. Many older than even the previous generation of consoles.
On consoles perhaps. On PC you have a lot more variation than that.
Wrong.
Why are you even trying to argue if you don't have anything to say? You can keep saying "Wrong" as often as you like, but that doesn't make it so. If you knew even the slightest thing about PC games, I don't think you could possibly get yourself to claim something so absurd.
...when WoW was raking in over $1 billion a year on its own.
That's not a market. That's one really rare exception.
In the sense that there's only one WoW, sure. But it's a really big one, and there are lots of lesser MMOGs that make plenty of money.
The PC game market is bigger in money than the console game market...
No, it's not.
Read this.
I admit it's a fuzzy market and it's hard to add up everything. I've also seen numbers of 17 billion and more. Keep in mind that the PC is a single platform, whereas there are 3 major console platforms. Maybe if you add them together, they're bigger than the PC market, but individually they're smaller.
You need to ignore quite a lot of the market in order to maintain the position that console games are more popular.
Speaking of that, very few companies are making money in the PC market.
Poor Blizzard and Valve. How will they ever survive? How about the many indie developers? It's only a handful of stupid self-destructive companies that manage to lose money on the PC.
That's why virtually all the games involve you being behind the sight of a gun.
On consoles perhaps. On PC you have a lot more variation than that.
I just switched to DuckDuckGo for me search needs. For everything else, I'll happily continue using Google, though.
I suppose you're right, but it's also employees that have changed. We switch jobs far more often than our dads did, and not just because we're fired.
In any case, my dad was also very expensive. He had a PhD and his employer (GE at the time, though it later became an independent company) originally didn't understand why he wanted to work there (my dad was unemployed at the time and just needed a job), but after they hired him, they quickly priced him out of the market, to the point that he made more money than his boss. And he was good for it. Only a few years ago, after lots of reorganizations, they wanted to fire him. It upset my dad, despite the fact that simply the severance pay would be enough to make it nearly to his retirement, but in the end they decided not to fire him, because he was simply too useful (and they wouldn't really save much money by firing him, I guess).
Anyway, my point was that he kept learning new stuff, and might continue doing that even after his retirement. Maybe he's a rare exception, but at a mere 40, any programmer that doesn't completely suck should be able to learn something new. And because of the more flexible job market, you really should learn something new regularly. That's what keeps you employable.
If you've got an MBA as well as lots of development experience, why don't you start your own company?
> 2. I'm expensive. I have 30 years of experience in the 'biz and a masters degree in CS. I'm not cheap. You could hire two 25 year olds for what I'm asking.
So: Are you twice as productive as two average 25 year olds?
Quite possibly. IBM once did a study that concluded that good programmers were 10 times as productive as bad ones.
For every single job I've had so far, I had to learn one or more new languages and frameworks.
My first job fresh out of university was Visual C++, and I had no Microsoft experience (though I did have some C/C++ experience).
For my second job, which was entirely Java, server-side javascript and XSLT, I was hired entirely on my C++ experience.
For my third job, Ruby, I was hired entirely on my Java experience.
For my current job, Groovy, I was hired for my Java and Ruby experience.
Okay, that last one makes sense, and C++ -> Java does too. But every single job requires you to learn something new. If you don't learn something new, then why did you change jobs in the first place? You're a programmer! You're supposed to be good at learning. And if you're an academically trained programmer, you're supposed to know the basic principles behind different programming paradigms, enabling you to learn languages with different paradigms quickly.
If you don't, then I suggest you fix it now.
The are fundamentally different, but anyone with a good computer science education should already know the basic principles behind them, and have no problem picking them up.
Besides, a programming language that doesn't change the way you think isn't worth learning.
I'm nearly 35, and I'm started to feel it. ...
I have another 5 years left in the field and I'm aware of it.
You've got to be kidding me. When I read the title of this story, I thought the submitter was 60 or something. Turns out he's only 40! My dad just retired at 65. He does most of his programming in Java nowadays. You calculate how old he must have been at least when he learned that. And he's always been a programmer, for the full 40 years (or nearly that) that he worked where he did. He did have to manage the occasional project, but he's always stayed mostly on the technical side, and has always remained a programmer.
I'm 37 and seriously considering becoming a freelance programmer. I'm currently studying Scala, and have a long list of other languages I still want to learn.
As long as your mind remains nimble, you're never too old to learn or to program.
That meme has also been wrong every year. Some ignorant people were still repeating that meme when WoW was raking in over $1 billion a year on its own.
The PC game market is bigger in money than the console game market, and that's only counting games that coast money. I'm pretty sure the market for free games is also bigger on PC than on consoles. You need to ignore quite a lot of the market in order to maintain the position that console games are more popular.
Balmer hates Google a lot more than he hates Mozilla. $85 million to hurt Google? I think he'd go for it.
Why wouldn't it be MS? Have you read the article? It makes a pretty good case for why it would be Microsoft.
Keep in mind that Facebook didn't invent social networks either. I just checked, and apparently Orkut is actually a month older than Facebook.
It does to me.
No, but that occupation did make "papers please" very impopular.
How can you delegate power to the government if you can't prove you exist? Or at least that you're American? Some kind of formal proof of existence and nationality is necessary for any large democracy to function.
On the other hand, Belgium is also the country that hasn't had a central government for over a year. I get the impression some Americans would appreciate that sort of thing.
Try using Fortran.
Why are people so down on angry birds? It's simple, clever, and innovative. It's the tetras of the 2010's.
And it's huge. The number of levels is enormous, as are the complexity and cleverness of many of the levels. It's also very well executed and polished.
I personally prefer 100+ hour CRPGs or strategy games, but Angry Birds is pretty amazing for what it does.
Two whole countries where practically everybody returned, and nobody elsewhere? Which two countries were those? Would be useful to know if I ever publish something for the iPhone.
Also, wouldn't it make more sense if Apple's return policy also had Apple pay back their share of the money? It's a bit strange if the developer has to pay extra for that, doesn't it? (I'd say it's a different matter if it's the developer who decides to reimburse the customer.)
Of course there's a workaround. That doesn't change the fact that it's needlessly restrictive.
A touchscreen has infinite possible variations of controls.
Yep, and they all suck total ass for almost every game out there, a few are playable ... some work fine like Scrabble and Angry Birds, but anything with action sucks ass on a touch screen without tactile feedback. Even with real buttons if they don't feel right, gameplay sucks.
You're entirely correct that action games are the niche where console controllers are really useful, but there are many other genres out there where mouse, keyboard or touch screen are superior.
Nobody is saying that consoles are going away. They're awesome for party games and action games. Just don't pretend that that's all of the game market.
PC gaming was, and still is, more popular than living room console gaming.
No, it's not, and never was.
Of course it is, and it has always been.
Well, there may have been a period where consoles really were more popular than PC games, but I'm not sure when exactly that period must have been, and it's definitely over now. I suppose it also depends on how you calculate popularity. Consoles might be more popular with old, big companies, but personally I don't think that matters.
Well, in terms of dollars, the console definitely reigns supreme. The PC game software market is about $700 million a year.
Are you kidding? WoW alone is more than that.
The big test here is: are there any other search engines that do this? Has Lucene implemented something similar, for example? And has Google ever made a fuss about that?