Exactly. I don't sift through every page and Adblock everything. One, it would be a waste of my time, and two, I actually do click on a few ads every once and a while. I use Adblock to get rid of "annoying" ads, like the ones screaming into my speakers that I won a free iPod Nano, or the ones who make huge flash overlays over half the page so I can't read the damn article. It's not immoral, it's pushback.
I work in the industry (art side, not code side), and I can say that at the end of the day it doesn't matter where you got your skills, as long as you have them.
We've got coders who are self taught, coders from 4 year programs, and across the spectrum in between. I would mainly suggest NOT going to DeVry or a vocational program like it. They don't offer a very strong foundation or practical projects to learn on. Go to a local community college and start working on mods if you want the cheaper/faster approach. Good C and.NET skills coupled with a good feel of game code (gained through modding) will be the foundation you need. From there, look at studios that have internship programs or offer short contracts for people new to the industry (do or die contracts).
A couple summers ago, I was backpacking across Europe and met an Australian guy who had a pretty good idea: mail your memory cards back home. Rather than trying to upload constantly to a laptop or iPod, he just sorted them using his camera, deleting ones that were fuzzy or bad, and when his card was full, he tape a few pieces of thin cardboard or plastic around it and stick it in a letter home. Never cost him more than a normal stamp or two. First, it's a great way to update people back home if you're going to be gone for a while. Second, it means you don't have to haul a laptop that will inevitably get stolen or damaged.
Memory cards are dirt cheap, especially if you get them in bulk online or from Sam's/Costco. Plus, in today's digital age, you can find them as easily as 35mm film in most countries. So if you run out, you can just buy some new ones. When he got home and was done with them, he wiped most of them and sold them on eBay or to his friends and got about half his money back. You do run the risk of losing your card in the mail, but that's not as bad as losing your laptop and losing a whole trip's worth of photos.
If your work isn't ready to be compiled, you can simply revert the build machine's copy to an earlier version. The important part is that you just get it in. If it can't check out your files for compile, the compiler breaks. Nobody really puts anything onto the build server until it's in a usable state for our projects.
At my software company, we have yearly bonuses and profit sharing. Both can be affected by what we call a "quality factor" or as some of our programmers deride it "quantitative quality." Basically, we have some set in stone rules set by our leads when it comes to workflow issues. For example, software compiles are scheduled every night at 8 (and a second at midnight if needed). Your work needs to be checked in to our tracking software by 8. If not, the compile will break. If you break a compile, your quality factor score goes down. If you remember and check your work back in by the midnight backup compile, your score ticks back up slightly. There are about a dozen of these rules, and they all center around interrupting other people's workflow. If you screw up a nightly compile, it means when people come to work in the morning, a new compile has to be kicked off and everybody has to wait. Every person whose workflow is interrupted gets a share of your quality factor points you lost. So at the end of the year, if you never screwed up, you get more money in your bonus. If you were constantly screwing up and making other people lose productivity, then you get less money and they get more to make up for your screw ups. If you screw up a normally expected amount of times, it ends up in a wash.
Before you ask, yes, there are certain people that hate that rule. But those people tend to be the ones losing out on money, and the ones screwing up a lot. Screwing up once or twice is no big deal. Screwing up on a weekly basis hurts you in the long urn, but it's really their fault for not correcting their problem. No, the entire bonus and profit sharing is not based around it, but it is a good chunk. One guy I shared an office with last year lost nearly $2000 out of his bonus. That ended up giving everybody about $50-75 more. Sure, that's not much of a gain for certain people, but it's a nice chunk of money to treat your wife/girlfriend to a nice holiday dinner at the end of the year. The important part is the loss hurts you big and requires that you stick to good practices for a long time to make it up.
Thompson is bringing a claim to the court that the game constitutes a menace. Since the game isn't actually out yet, the judge has no way to proceed with this claim until he sees the product. I fully anticipate he'll view it for a few days, take a few days of consultation, and then reach a sumary judgement for the defendants. You'll be hard pressed to find a judge willing to prohibit free speech or free commerce of this kind. Blocking the sale of a legal commerical product won't pass much constitutional scrutiny and would be thrown out in an instant by a higher court.
This is just Jack Thompson wanting attention for his upcoming book (hell, he called his co-author as a witness). Giving him attention is letting him win.
I work for a mid-sized (70-100) person video game company. We're moving to a new floor in the same building shortly. We'll now own the entire floor instead of 2/3rds of the floor we're on now. While we do have some common areas, we're really trying to focus on giving everybody a space of their own, even though we all share offices (2-4 people per office). The plan so far is that rather than forcing decorations on people, we're going to give each room the equivalent money to order their own stuff. If they want small desks so they can use the rset of the sapce for a meeting table or couch, so be it. If they want to buy bookshelf dividers (no cubicles walls allowed), so be it. All the final purchases have to be approved, so they way whatever gets purchased will at least be professional in appearance, but each room may do as they please. Rooms will be given an extra bonus to spend if their plans incorporate shared space such as meeting tables, design tables, or multi-person desks or if they incorporate ideas that encourage outseide people to come into the office (comfy chairs for guests, small couches, entertainment units, etc). The idea is that the the offices will encourage people to go visit each other more often and hold impromptu meetings in their offices rather than booking the conference room 3 days from now.
When Microsoft leans to design towards waht consumers want instead of dictating to consumers what they want, they'll be able to take on the iPod. Unfortunately, to most people in their target demographic Microsoft nows stands for bad design, shoddy products, and unhip stodgyness.
Wouldn't be a bad job to be one of the handful of people maintaining the facility. You've got your own underground world that you only have to shave with a dozen othre people. Install some fun tubes, slides, and ball pits, and you've got yourself a cool clubhouse.
MS Rep: That's a real nice website you got there Mr Thurrott.
PT: Thanks.
MS Rep: It would be a shame if it was accidentally got blocked by IE 7 for being unsecure.
PT: Now how the hell would that happen?
MS Rep: You know. Things happen. Websites get added to lists. Thumbs get accidentally broken. It's a funny world.
PT: Come to think of it, I think I'm using a bad serial number.
MS Rep: Atta boy.
If you go through that article, you'll see that Microsoft is already putting out a tool to prevent the automatic update to IE7. I thought it would be a good idea to install this seeing as I have no desire to have Microsoft pump IE7 onto my computer when it is for the most part untested and most likely full of security holes that have yet to be found. So I was thinking Microsoft was actually being very nice to consumers to let us have the option of turning the download off ahead of time. Buuuuuuuuuuut.....
As it turns out Microsoft isn't that benevolent. You run smack dab into a check to see whether or not you've installed Windows Genuine Advantage. I haven't. My copy of XP is perfectly legal and has never touched another computer. But I still am not comfortable with my computer calling Microsoft every day telling them what a happy customer I am, so I have no intention on installing it in the near future. Call me paranoid, but any software from Microsoft that will be doing any sort of hidden connection and any sort of transmission of data that I'm not allowed to monitor or check on crosses a boundary for me. Today it's that my copy of Windows is legal. Tomorrow it's what my favorite websites are. The day after that it's what DVDs I stick in my hard drive. But we've all heard this rant, so I'll just move on.
I hope somebody brings this up within the tech community or in the blogosphere. It doesn't seem kosher to have to install spyware in order to get my legal copy of Windows to behave like I'd like it to. Oh well, time to go buy a MacBook Pro.
...except for the fact that the interface will probably be clunkier (innovative!), the software will run slower and be full of the usual microsoft bloatware and security holes (integration!), and the overall user experience will be so unfocused that average consumers will be lost (powerful!).
We've seen this all from Microsoft before, and we all know where it's headed. They'll win marketshare by pure attrition. They've got the money to stay in long term which means instead of eating at Apple's marketshare, they'll kill off their "partners" who spent the last 5 years putting products into the market doing all the initial testing for MS. Now MS can come in with a service that offers per track pricing as well as all-you-can-download rentals and a device that plays MS's format they spent so long licensing to other people. All those "partners" are suddenly in the cold because nobody really needs their players or services now that MS has the whole bag in one package.
Microsoft's flaw so far has been really weak software. It will be interesting to see if they roll out something new that isn't WMP. I've yet to meet anybody who actually prefers to use WMP given the choice. It's clunky. It hogs system resources. The music store is a joke. It throws ads at you nonstop if you try to use it's media library feature. It doesn't organize your albums anywhere as nicely as iTunes does. And let's not forget the fact that it's almost as bad for security as IE is.
Oh well, at least Microsoft finally has all of it's cards on the table. It should be interesting to see what the next big iPod/iTunes announcement will be. Fullscreen iPod with touch screen capability? Increased video playback? Movie rentals? Movie purchases? Wifi/Bluetooth? All of the above? Now that Microsoft has been nice enough to show where it is going, Apple's got time to do it first or at least do it better. And if MS is planning on a big Superbowl ad campaign, how much do you want to bet Apple will field a commercial later during the game taking a few shots at MS?
Reserving any moral judgements, I agree that fair use stops when money starts changing hands. If this service of editing was offered for free, that is one thing, and I would consider that fair use. You can use your copy in a non-commercial way for your viewing pleasure. But they're profiting off this. People are paying them money ostensibly for a new version of the film. You can argue that you're paying for the labor and not the prodcut, but that is splitting hairs. Plus, they aren't scrubbing each movie individually. They scrub once and resell that copy. I pay for labor at my auto shop because even if they're done 20 of the same installations in the same day, they do it over again for each car. Cleanplay isn't a labor charge in the traditional sense.
I'll also add this. There is a fairly clean analogy here to modding video games. You take an original and edit the content (sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly) and all of a sudden have a different experience. It's been legally established you can't sell a mod because you don't have the right to redistribute the content. You can give it away for free to people that alrady have that content, but you can't sell (unless you come to a legal agreement, i.e. CS, DoD, Red Orchestra). Same situation applies here. If they want to release these editted copies for free to people that already own a copy, they would probably be in much better legal territory. But since money is being exchanged, they've got a problem.
I've got a perfectly legal copy of XP Pro, and I have no intention of ever installing this WGA stuff. It's not a crticial security upgrade, and I have too much specialized hardware and software on this thing to risk a complete meltdown like other people have had problems with. So my EULA is perfectly valid and doesn't seem to contain anything that gives MS the right to stop my computer from functioning. The burden of proof is on Ms on this one. If they can prove somebody is running an illegal copy of Windows, shut them down. Fine by me. But blanketly turning off everybody who doesn't agree to run a little memory hogging, system crashing widget is a no-no in my book.
I was strongly considering moving over to a Mac w/ Boot Camp now that I can get my software to run (hardware is going to be a different story, so I might need a linux box for some of it), but is MS does this, I'm going to be going down to my local Apple Store the day they confirm it.
I'd like to think that when I have a kid one day, he/she will be smarter than this technology. If my kid was dumb enough to take their cell phone out of some "safe zone" I had set up, or not know to turn the freaking thing off, I'd be shocked. This is why my parents never tried this stuff when I was in high school. They tried to have a single conversation about the "world wide web" with me (this was 1995), and they soon figured out I knew way more about technology than they could ever hope to understand. Thus, they left me be and told me not to do anything stupid.
I wouldn't expect the iPods themselves to be big sellers (not going to do you a lot of good on the flight with no music loaded onto it), but you could make a killing selling accesssories out of that thing at an airport.
How many times have you packed your bags and forgot your charger? Just buy a new one at the airport.
Tired of all that loud airplane noise? Get some noise cancelling headphones before your flight.
Plus, having seen these high-end vending machines in use before, most of the time they don't even have a money slot. You have to use a credit or debit card.
In college, I was an English major and my roommate was an Electrical Engineering major (wacky hijinx ensued). Around junior and sneior year he began to take the remaining humanities courses he needed, and was now faced with having to write reports and other assignments. Like a lot of engineers, he wasn't that great at it. He had the basic functions of grammar, but he had no form. Getting him to break out of simple sentences and direct lines of logic took a while, but I tried my best to help him (and in return he paid for the beer). Here were some of the things I found helpful:
1) Getting him to say things outloud first. If it was supposed to be a persuasive paper or some sort of analysis, I had him explain his argument to me outloud. This gave him an opportunity to explain his thoughts in complex sentences and think out everything he wanted to put donw on paper. Once, I even recorded it for him and made him listen to it before he wrote. This really helped his transition from thinking to writing without that pesky engineering filter killing his points.
2) Writing for fun. Since I was taking numerous writing classes where I had to keep journals, I got him to start his own journal. I told him it could be anything he wanted, as long as he tried to write different things in it. In the end he started to write small poems, short stories, and a diary in the same spiral. More than anything, this got him used to writing in different form while still keeping his voice. It also made him into a faster writer.
3) Red ink is painful, but needed. I loved my roommate like a brother, but I was more than willing to slam red ink all over his rough drafts. The problem with showing your rough drafts to peers in classes is that people fear reciprocation. If you say something negative, people might do the same to yours. So you get a lot of cursory comma markers and spelling errors, but nothing of real value. So I'd go through his and find everything I could think of that was possibly wrong. Jumps in logic. Grammar errors. Splitting paragraphs. Suggesting where sentences could be deleted or rearranged. At first he didn't like it, but he certainly went back and gave his papers a hard edit. After a few papers, I could just read it over and give him those same comments face to face while avoiding the little errors he already started to fix on his own. In a classroom setting, consider doing peer revisions anonymously, and explain that editing means more than comma splices.
Those things really seemed to help him get out of his shell. To this day I don't think that Engineers are bad writers, they just have this wierd filter installed in their heads that won't let a lot of them write down what they're thinking about. They can explain it to you outloud, but not write down those same words on paper. Getting them past that hurdle is the best thing you can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I don't sift through every page and Adblock everything. One, it would be a waste of my time, and two, I actually do click on a few ads every once and a while. I use Adblock to get rid of "annoying" ads, like the ones screaming into my speakers that I won a free iPod Nano, or the ones who make huge flash overlays over half the page so I can't read the damn article. It's not immoral, it's pushback.
I work in the industry (art side, not code side), and I can say that at the end of the day it doesn't matter where you got your skills, as long as you have them.
.NET skills coupled with a good feel of game code (gained through modding) will be the foundation you need. From there, look at studios that have internship programs or offer short contracts for people new to the industry (do or die contracts).
We've got coders who are self taught, coders from 4 year programs, and across the spectrum in between. I would mainly suggest NOT going to DeVry or a vocational program like it. They don't offer a very strong foundation or practical projects to learn on. Go to a local community college and start working on mods if you want the cheaper/faster approach. Good C and
A couple summers ago, I was backpacking across Europe and met an Australian guy who had a pretty good idea: mail your memory cards back home. Rather than trying to upload constantly to a laptop or iPod, he just sorted them using his camera, deleting ones that were fuzzy or bad, and when his card was full, he tape a few pieces of thin cardboard or plastic around it and stick it in a letter home. Never cost him more than a normal stamp or two. First, it's a great way to update people back home if you're going to be gone for a while. Second, it means you don't have to haul a laptop that will inevitably get stolen or damaged.
Memory cards are dirt cheap, especially if you get them in bulk online or from Sam's/Costco. Plus, in today's digital age, you can find them as easily as 35mm film in most countries. So if you run out, you can just buy some new ones. When he got home and was done with them, he wiped most of them and sold them on eBay or to his friends and got about half his money back. You do run the risk of losing your card in the mail, but that's not as bad as losing your laptop and losing a whole trip's worth of photos.
If your work isn't ready to be compiled, you can simply revert the build machine's copy to an earlier version. The important part is that you just get it in. If it can't check out your files for compile, the compiler breaks. Nobody really puts anything onto the build server until it's in a usable state for our projects.
At my software company, we have yearly bonuses and profit sharing. Both can be affected by what we call a "quality factor" or as some of our programmers deride it "quantitative quality." Basically, we have some set in stone rules set by our leads when it comes to workflow issues. For example, software compiles are scheduled every night at 8 (and a second at midnight if needed). Your work needs to be checked in to our tracking software by 8. If not, the compile will break. If you break a compile, your quality factor score goes down. If you remember and check your work back in by the midnight backup compile, your score ticks back up slightly. There are about a dozen of these rules, and they all center around interrupting other people's workflow. If you screw up a nightly compile, it means when people come to work in the morning, a new compile has to be kicked off and everybody has to wait. Every person whose workflow is interrupted gets a share of your quality factor points you lost. So at the end of the year, if you never screwed up, you get more money in your bonus. If you were constantly screwing up and making other people lose productivity, then you get less money and they get more to make up for your screw ups. If you screw up a normally expected amount of times, it ends up in a wash.
Before you ask, yes, there are certain people that hate that rule. But those people tend to be the ones losing out on money, and the ones screwing up a lot. Screwing up once or twice is no big deal. Screwing up on a weekly basis hurts you in the long urn, but it's really their fault for not correcting their problem. No, the entire bonus and profit sharing is not based around it, but it is a good chunk. One guy I shared an office with last year lost nearly $2000 out of his bonus. That ended up giving everybody about $50-75 more. Sure, that's not much of a gain for certain people, but it's a nice chunk of money to treat your wife/girlfriend to a nice holiday dinner at the end of the year. The important part is the loss hurts you big and requires that you stick to good practices for a long time to make it up.
Threads about AIDS really hurts some of our abilities to make jokes or insert Simpsons quotes into as many threads as possible.
Because when I think Sony, I think consumer protection.
Thompson is bringing a claim to the court that the game constitutes a menace. Since the game isn't actually out yet, the judge has no way to proceed with this claim until he sees the product. I fully anticipate he'll view it for a few days, take a few days of consultation, and then reach a sumary judgement for the defendants. You'll be hard pressed to find a judge willing to prohibit free speech or free commerce of this kind. Blocking the sale of a legal commerical product won't pass much constitutional scrutiny and would be thrown out in an instant by a higher court.
This is just Jack Thompson wanting attention for his upcoming book (hell, he called his co-author as a witness). Giving him attention is letting him win.
I work for a mid-sized (70-100) person video game company. We're moving to a new floor in the same building shortly. We'll now own the entire floor instead of 2/3rds of the floor we're on now. While we do have some common areas, we're really trying to focus on giving everybody a space of their own, even though we all share offices (2-4 people per office). The plan so far is that rather than forcing decorations on people, we're going to give each room the equivalent money to order their own stuff. If they want small desks so they can use the rset of the sapce for a meeting table or couch, so be it. If they want to buy bookshelf dividers (no cubicles walls allowed), so be it. All the final purchases have to be approved, so they way whatever gets purchased will at least be professional in appearance, but each room may do as they please. Rooms will be given an extra bonus to spend if their plans incorporate shared space such as meeting tables, design tables, or multi-person desks or if they incorporate ideas that encourage outseide people to come into the office (comfy chairs for guests, small couches, entertainment units, etc). The idea is that the the offices will encourage people to go visit each other more often and hold impromptu meetings in their offices rather than booking the conference room 3 days from now.
Me fail English? That's unpossible.
When Microsoft leans to design towards waht consumers want instead of dictating to consumers what they want, they'll be able to take on the iPod. Unfortunately, to most people in their target demographic Microsoft nows stands for bad design, shoddy products, and unhip stodgyness.
E3 is dead! Long live E3!
Wouldn't be a bad job to be one of the handful of people maintaining the facility. You've got your own underground world that you only have to shave with a dozen othre people. Install some fun tubes, slides, and ball pits, and you've got yourself a cool clubhouse.
MS Rep: That's a real nice website you got there Mr Thurrott.
PT: Thanks.
MS Rep: It would be a shame if it was accidentally got blocked by IE 7 for being unsecure.
PT: Now how the hell would that happen?
MS Rep: You know. Things happen. Websites get added to lists. Thumbs get accidentally broken. It's a funny world.
PT: Come to think of it, I think I'm using a bad serial number.
MS Rep: Atta boy.
Wait, so is New Hampshire bigger than Galactus?
If you go through that article, you'll see that Microsoft is already putting out a tool to prevent the automatic update to IE7. I thought it would be a good idea to install this seeing as I have no desire to have Microsoft pump IE7 onto my computer when it is for the most part untested and most likely full of security holes that have yet to be found. So I was thinking Microsoft was actually being very nice to consumers to let us have the option of turning the download off ahead of time. Buuuuuuuuuuut.....
s px?FamilyId=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&d isplaylang=en
As it turns out Microsoft isn't that benevolent. You run smack dab into a check to see whether or not you've installed Windows Genuine Advantage. I haven't. My copy of XP is perfectly legal and has never touched another computer. But I still am not comfortable with my computer calling Microsoft every day telling them what a happy customer I am, so I have no intention on installing it in the near future. Call me paranoid, but any software from Microsoft that will be doing any sort of hidden connection and any sort of transmission of data that I'm not allowed to monitor or check on crosses a boundary for me. Today it's that my copy of Windows is legal. Tomorrow it's what my favorite websites are. The day after that it's what DVDs I stick in my hard drive. But we've all heard this rant, so I'll just move on.
I hope somebody brings this up within the tech community or in the blogosphere. It doesn't seem kosher to have to install spyware in order to get my legal copy of Windows to behave like I'd like it to. Oh well, time to go buy a MacBook Pro.
Link:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.a
Sure a game with the name Monopoly would be above the influence of corporate interests like Visa!!
...except for the fact that the interface will probably be clunkier (innovative!), the software will run slower and be full of the usual microsoft bloatware and security holes (integration!), and the overall user experience will be so unfocused that average consumers will be lost (powerful!).
We've seen this all from Microsoft before, and we all know where it's headed. They'll win marketshare by pure attrition. They've got the money to stay in long term which means instead of eating at Apple's marketshare, they'll kill off their "partners" who spent the last 5 years putting products into the market doing all the initial testing for MS. Now MS can come in with a service that offers per track pricing as well as all-you-can-download rentals and a device that plays MS's format they spent so long licensing to other people. All those "partners" are suddenly in the cold because nobody really needs their players or services now that MS has the whole bag in one package.
Microsoft's flaw so far has been really weak software. It will be interesting to see if they roll out something new that isn't WMP. I've yet to meet anybody who actually prefers to use WMP given the choice. It's clunky. It hogs system resources. The music store is a joke. It throws ads at you nonstop if you try to use it's media library feature. It doesn't organize your albums anywhere as nicely as iTunes does. And let's not forget the fact that it's almost as bad for security as IE is.
Oh well, at least Microsoft finally has all of it's cards on the table. It should be interesting to see what the next big iPod/iTunes announcement will be. Fullscreen iPod with touch screen capability? Increased video playback? Movie rentals? Movie purchases? Wifi/Bluetooth? All of the above? Now that Microsoft has been nice enough to show where it is going, Apple's got time to do it first or at least do it better. And if MS is planning on a big Superbowl ad campaign, how much do you want to bet Apple will field a commercial later during the game taking a few shots at MS?
Reserving any moral judgements, I agree that fair use stops when money starts changing hands. If this service of editing was offered for free, that is one thing, and I would consider that fair use. You can use your copy in a non-commercial way for your viewing pleasure. But they're profiting off this. People are paying them money ostensibly for a new version of the film. You can argue that you're paying for the labor and not the prodcut, but that is splitting hairs. Plus, they aren't scrubbing each movie individually. They scrub once and resell that copy. I pay for labor at my auto shop because even if they're done 20 of the same installations in the same day, they do it over again for each car. Cleanplay isn't a labor charge in the traditional sense. I'll also add this. There is a fairly clean analogy here to modding video games. You take an original and edit the content (sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly) and all of a sudden have a different experience. It's been legally established you can't sell a mod because you don't have the right to redistribute the content. You can give it away for free to people that alrady have that content, but you can't sell (unless you come to a legal agreement, i.e. CS, DoD, Red Orchestra). Same situation applies here. If they want to release these editted copies for free to people that already own a copy, they would probably be in much better legal territory. But since money is being exchanged, they've got a problem.
I've got a perfectly legal copy of XP Pro, and I have no intention of ever installing this WGA stuff. It's not a crticial security upgrade, and I have too much specialized hardware and software on this thing to risk a complete meltdown like other people have had problems with. So my EULA is perfectly valid and doesn't seem to contain anything that gives MS the right to stop my computer from functioning. The burden of proof is on Ms on this one. If they can prove somebody is running an illegal copy of Windows, shut them down. Fine by me. But blanketly turning off everybody who doesn't agree to run a little memory hogging, system crashing widget is a no-no in my book. I was strongly considering moving over to a Mac w/ Boot Camp now that I can get my software to run (hardware is going to be a different story, so I might need a linux box for some of it), but is MS does this, I'm going to be going down to my local Apple Store the day they confirm it.
Well, as a Pc user, my immediate reaction is to just get some high gloss spraypaint and cover it up... I feel shame for myself.
Well, if you can't really achieve victory, just change the goalposts to something easier and calim you won.
I'd like to think that when I have a kid one day, he/she will be smarter than this technology. If my kid was dumb enough to take their cell phone out of some "safe zone" I had set up, or not know to turn the freaking thing off, I'd be shocked. This is why my parents never tried this stuff when I was in high school. They tried to have a single conversation about the "world wide web" with me (this was 1995), and they soon figured out I knew way more about technology than they could ever hope to understand. Thus, they left me be and told me not to do anything stupid.
I wouldn't expect the iPods themselves to be big sellers (not going to do you a lot of good on the flight with no music loaded onto it), but you could make a killing selling accesssories out of that thing at an airport. How many times have you packed your bags and forgot your charger? Just buy a new one at the airport. Tired of all that loud airplane noise? Get some noise cancelling headphones before your flight. Plus, having seen these high-end vending machines in use before, most of the time they don't even have a money slot. You have to use a credit or debit card.
1) Getting him to say things outloud first. If it was supposed to be a persuasive paper or some sort of analysis, I had him explain his argument to me outloud. This gave him an opportunity to explain his thoughts in complex sentences and think out everything he wanted to put donw on paper. Once, I even recorded it for him and made him listen to it before he wrote. This really helped his transition from thinking to writing without that pesky engineering filter killing his points.
2) Writing for fun. Since I was taking numerous writing classes where I had to keep journals, I got him to start his own journal. I told him it could be anything he wanted, as long as he tried to write different things in it. In the end he started to write small poems, short stories, and a diary in the same spiral. More than anything, this got him used to writing in different form while still keeping his voice. It also made him into a faster writer.
3) Red ink is painful, but needed. I loved my roommate like a brother, but I was more than willing to slam red ink all over his rough drafts. The problem with showing your rough drafts to peers in classes is that people fear reciprocation. If you say something negative, people might do the same to yours. So you get a lot of cursory comma markers and spelling errors, but nothing of real value. So I'd go through his and find everything I could think of that was possibly wrong. Jumps in logic. Grammar errors. Splitting paragraphs. Suggesting where sentences could be deleted or rearranged. At first he didn't like it, but he certainly went back and gave his papers a hard edit. After a few papers, I could just read it over and give him those same comments face to face while avoiding the little errors he already started to fix on his own. In a classroom setting, consider doing peer revisions anonymously, and explain that editing means more than comma splices.
Those things really seemed to help him get out of his shell. To this day I don't think that Engineers are bad writers, they just have this wierd filter installed in their heads that won't let a lot of them write down what they're thinking about. They can explain it to you outloud, but not write down those same words on paper. Getting them past that hurdle is the best thing you can do.