More tired bullshit about uncanny valley... Thanks.
The facts are different. One, there was no research whatsoever that would demonstrate that people generally consider almost-but-not-quite photrealistic CGI "creepy". Such research was simply not done and all you have are your own personal opinions that you didn't like some movie and think it's creepy.
Two, there have been a grand total of TWO films that were done using photrealistic CGI actors. One - Final Fantasy, and two - Polar Express. You simply can't make any conclusions based on just two films. Also, both movies had a plethora of other problems that might have been responsible for their relative lack of success. For example, Final Fantasy had a story, which is typical for Japanese anime, but unfamiliar to general American moviegoing public. Polar Express was a Christmas story - those usually have limited box office prospects - and it was released similtaneously with Incredibles, backed by the strength of Pixar brand.
Three, a lot of people liked these two photorealistic movies. They were not complete flops and even though their box office revenues left something to be desired, this can be simply explaned by the fact that they had to invest a lot in developing and perfecting the technology. If not for this factor, both Final Fantasy and Polar Express would have easily been commercial successes. In particular, Polar Express is very popular with children and young teenagers, it was rated 4 stars by Roger Ebert, who was otherwise a proponent of this unscientific "uncanny valley" theory and some people who have seen it in IMAX report it as the best movie experience in their lives.
So in conclusion, Pixar's success probably has nothing to do with them staying outside of that mythical valley, and more to do with making quality films with good story. Seeing how they are willing to experiment with each new project, it is not unlikely that in a few years they would attempt to make a photorealistic computer animated film.
The robots are different. We are finally on the edge of creating "perfect predators", robotic creatures that have a range of tools to find, track, identify and destroy their targets. All that while working in teams, while using existing surveilance and communication tools. It would be simply impossible for natural species to evolve enough to survive.
In nature it's impossible for perfect predators to evolve, because a) their victims evolve with the same speed b) there is an energy tradeoff - it's better to be just a good predator so that you don't waste your energy on extremely difficult cases. This is not true for artificial ones, since a) we are talking about design + evolution b) the energy can be gotten externally.
Actually this isn't true at all. When you are that high you can step outside the space station and you will hover indefinitely. To get down you need to get rid of the energy you have, and to do it you need to climb back, which will take basically the same time.:)
There are plans to make a "release" version of Wikipedia, by selecting a subset of articles, factchecking, peerreviewing them and then freezing them in a separate address space.
There are also plans for a system that would allow references to be integrated into the very fabric of articles much better than it's done now.
There are a lot of ideas and projects going on in Wikipedia. People there realise all the weaknesses Wikipedia currently has, but also understand that the Rome wasn't built in one day. Don't treat Wikipedia as finished yet, treat it as a work in progress, which just happens to already be useful for many purposes.
Also realise that there is no possible way that in 2030 there won't exist an open, free, authoritative and complete source of all human knowledge, accessible online from any place on this planet and some places beyond, that contains everything worthwhile that was ever written, the true sum of all human knowledge, constantly updated and checked. And if one has to guess, whether it will be based on Britannica or Wikipedia, I guess the latter looks slightly more likely.
Wikipedia process doesn't aim to always improve articles which each single edit. It only tries to improve aritles most of the time. Yes, in some unlucky cases, mistake can be introduced by people who honestly try to help, but in this case mistakes are fixed much more often than they are introduced.
Wikipedia single greatest problem is, without doubt, the antiquated American system of copyright, damned be those fucktards at Disney. The main reason why the quality of Wikipedia is not as high as one might have liked is because wikipedians need to create the whole encyclopedia from scratch, do it for free and because they chose to approach it on a wide front.
To mature, Wikipedia might need another decade. To mature only a subset of its articles through fact-checking and peer-review it might need 5 years or so. One must understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that it's provided AS IS. It doesn't claim to be better than Encarta or Britannica, if you don't like it, don't use it. However, the very openness and freedom ensured that it became popular. Even though it's not ready yet.
The same can be said about many open-source products - they are still in 0.9, but many people find it good enough to use them in production settings.
Wikipedia is already good enough and there is no way it's gonna get worse. Eventually we'll have AI read the digitized references and check and crosscheck the facts. But for now it's good enough and what's better, it's free, open and more up-to-date than many alternatives.
It you who don't get it. By choosing b or d you mostly send EA the message "I don't like your games, they are shit". This says nothing to them about your dislike for their treatment of the programmers. By choosing c you tell them "You make good games, but there are reasons why I feel uncomfortable paying you, please change".
If you chose b or d, they might think that their games are not good enough and need more features. This might in turn lead to 90 hour weeks and would harm the programmers even more. Choose responsibly. Chose piracy.
When I was a kid, I read a book about the search for Atlantis. Among other cool things there was a world map illustrating where different authors had put it in their papers/books. Let me tell you, the whole world was covered in little dots, including the middle of Sahara and The Himalaya! You can check some of the ideas at Wikipedia.
I dunno, really... I like it more online, 'cause I can use technological solution to solve problems and they work. In Real World I have to watch on the ads, because I can't walk with my eyes closed. I have to listen to ads on radio when it's playing in public places. But in the comfort of my home, on my PC I am almost completely safe from intrusive ads. AtGuard! and Proxomitron remove all and any adverts. The only drawbacks are that the page layout is mangled sometimes when I remove a huge banner and that ads on some minor sites can get through.
Really, I like it better online. Can't wait for Augmented Reality glasses that would do the same for real world.
The data on the Internet obviously doesn't include all data on the harddrives of the users. I don't make all my files available online and what I make available is usually redundant. But it's not like it's really that important...
The point is - shopping as an activity is stupid anyway. You waste your time and a bit of your soul (if there was such a thing) every time you go inside a Wal-Mart. Doing some creative stuff like feeding junk info into the database is not a waste of time - it's fun, it helps maintain your sanity and there is nothing wrong with that. It's not like you should be productive every single second of your life.
You forget that if you collected all the HDDs of the Internet users, copied this onto one huge virtual disk and zipped it, after a few years you would probably end up with a rather small file. You see, I have almost 0.5TByte of data on my PC, but only about 20 Gb of it is unique (5Gb of personal photos, 5Gb of documents, 7Gb of some films I was editing, 2Gb of game save files, etc.). The rest are programs that are installed on thousands (millions?) of other computers, movies, music and picture that are on many other computers, etc.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has 430Tb of unique, non-repeating (mostly) data.
Of course, all such comparisions are moot. For example, assuming Sims 2 sold 4 million copies, there is 1 petabyte of saves files, that are (albeit somewhat similar) unique to each user! What is more valuable, interesting and important - half a petabyte of Wal-Mart data containing purchasing history of basically every American citizen, a petabyte of data containing fictionous suburban neighbourhoods populated with simplistic simulated game characters or a petabyte of sattelite images of Earth? Petabytes are not born equal.:)
Most links are probably in Russian. I would be glad to find some references in English, the problem is I get terribly depressed when I read about this stuff and immediately want to "kill them all" or something.:)
So much needs to be written, but I will avoid the impulse to start writing a comprehensive 10-page treatise on the problem and will give only some of the most important reasons.
1) Our government are a bunch of traitor sell-outs. Sad, but true. It goes beyond incompetence when government spendings on science decrease each and every year since 1991, and when the spendings on one school pupil per GPD per capita in Russia are 2nd lowest in the world (the lowest is Nigeria or Zimbabwe, don't remember which). 2) Economic collapse was horrible. Production in Russia dropped 50% (Great Depression was about 30%), Russia is still worse off than it was in 1989. Other former Soviet Republics are even worse... sometimes much worse (with the exception of Baltic states). 3) The stratification is horrible. 10% richest people get 15 more money than 10% poorest. 4) Government employees (doctors, teachers, university professors) were hit the worst. A significant fraction of them had income below poverty line. Once I was paid 10$/month for teaching (doing it probably better than any of the hundreds of teachers there ever could) financial management to 150 students in a large, well-known, supposedly prestigeous university. This created problems, which cannot be easily fixed, even now, when some professors can finally earn enough. 5) Formalism crept into schools. It became hard to do the job well, but as long as you took care about all formalities (students attended, exams passed, that kind of stuff), you were fine. This spread to students too - as long as you write and present a paper, you pass, even when the whole paper was copy-pasted from an internet page and you don't understand a single fucking sentence that is written there. 6) Education in schools degraded and now 1st year students don't know how to read and understand texts, they can't express themselves, they don't know basic math, they don't know anything about other disciplines. Still, they may have excellent grades and it appears that everything is fine. 7) People irrationally continued to believe that they still have the best education system in the world that Soviet Union had. It's no longer true, but people found it more comfortable to beleive this lie than to realise the horrible truth and do something. 8) Teachers lost qualification or left schools. With low pay and no motivation to work well you got mostly poor performers. 9) It's impossible to change anything if you are alone, and 10) Nobody cares. Or at least it looks this way. 11) In Venezuela President Chavez opened a school in his palace to do something to improve the education and to show that he cared. The fucking abomination that Russia has for president had both his bastard girls studying in Europe. How much does he care? The criminals governing other xUSSR countries care even less (see [1]).
This is a gist of the sad story that is education in former USSR republics. Needless to say, with 200 million people living there, there are some places where the situation is good, some where it's even great, but overall it's exactly as I described.
Theoretically I can, but mostly you just have to take my word for it, because I live in Russia, know enough to understand how the political and economican mechanisms work in CIS, because many of my classmates work in offshore programming (because I graduated from math school), because I taught in a university and know firsthand how corrupt and rotten the system is, because I worked as a financial analyst in technology sector of an investment bank here, etc., etc. Just take my word for it, Ukraine will NOT become a notable player in the global IT market.
It should have been obvious, but I'll say it. There are four basic strategies: a) Buy EA games b) Don't get any games c) Pirate EA games d) Buy competitor's games
For EA, a > c > b > d Any strategy other than a is possible to use to send EA a message. Of course, d would be the most effective, but c is effective too.
Sorry, but if you use this meaning, you need to stop making conclusions about sales from this "marketshare". It doesn't logically follow that Microsoft has huge sales of its office software in Russia from the fact that MS Office has a 90% "marketshare" there and almost every computer has some office software.
You should use the term "mindshare" to avoid confusion. If we stop buying EA games and start pirating them, the products will continue to be popular but they will stop bringing EA money. And as much as they may enjoy the amazing popularity of their games, ultimately they care more about money, so pirating its games is a valid tactic for harming Electronic Arts.
Not directly, perhaps. But there are reasons to believe that if they couldn't use this monopoly to shove this overpriced "junk" towards our collective throats, the business model would have to change towards lower prices, which would mean significant changes to current marketing practices (and business practices in general). For example, imagine that labels had to make profit on each and every artist to survive.
Of course, it's very hard to predict what changes would result from the destruction of this "cartel". And it's equally hard to even tell how it should be destroyed. What exactly the RIAA does that is so bad for the customers and the industry? I don't know, but I know that the industry is not healthy, it's outright rotten. Any change would be for the better and one consequence would be the ability of some labels to sell quality cheap music.
That's a matter of semantics. According to some definitions that were used in early 20th century, they probably aren't. But if we draw parallels between that and modern America, I would say that their situation is pretty close, regardless of how we call them. Consider a definition from Wikipedia:
"In Marxist theory, the proletariat is that class of society which does not have ownership of the means of production. Therefore, the only source of income for proletarians is wage labor... Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (owner class) as inherently hostile..."
A lot of details match - proletarians in 1900s owed a lot of money to the company's shop - this forced them to work and not complain just like modern programmers need to work to pay for their house/car/etc. Workers 100 years ago couldn't really complain, couldn't change anything - this is still basically true today. Work conditions were horrible, working hours long, same is true today to some extent. This can be continued on and on.
Of course, 1900s workers would be glad to have the kind of job game developers have today, even if they had to work 100 hours a week. But when we judge the situation of EA programmers by modern standards we realise that their conditons are still inhumane. In that sense, I guess, we can call them "the proletarians of the 21st century" or something...
The problem is not what you describe, the problem is that in almost every Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldavian (add the rest of the CIS) university only 5% of students are worth anything. This doesn't mean that 95% of students who are not good in CS/IT/programming/whatever you call it will be good in something else, this means they will still attend the lectures (if even that) in the CS department, but will learn nothing (spelled N-O-T-H-I-N-G). So in the end only 5% of all graduates have any skills and knowledge worth speaking of. Which means that of all graduates only 0.2% will be good programmers, 0.2% will be good managers, etc. And 90-95% will be stupid illiterates who are only capable of a low-level (in the US that would be flipping burgers, in CIS there aren't as many burger joints to employ them).
Education is xUSSR is really fucked up now and I know what I am talking about (though I was lucky to get exceptionally good education:] most people aren't as lucky).
Romania is not Ukraine. In Ukraine they may teach students about graphs and minimum spanning trees, but with no students understanding what the hell this means, not asking questions, then pretending they do a project and pass an exam, without actually knowing ANYTHING in the end. This is not an understatement, that's exactly how it works for 95% or the students.
My view on this is that this huge potential will remain just that - potential, without translating into anything tangible, like a huge booming offshore programming industry like in India.
There are many reasons for this, but I'll list the main ones only:
1) The government doesn't give a squat about programming industry or economy in general. They won't care about it unless there are some money to be had for them. It won't happen unless the industry magically develops by itself and even then will only be to its detriment. 2) Yes, Ukraine is better than most other CIS countries, but that only means they are neck-deep in shit instead of being totally submerged like Uzbekistan, Kyrgistan, Tajikistan and other whateverstans. Ukraine is worse off than Russia and that's saying something. 3) These graduates aren't good. You all know about problems in American educational system, but in Ukraine (and other CIS countries) people who graduate from schools are often simply functionally illiterate. They are just going through the motions without actually learning or understanding anything. You may think cheating and grade inflation became problems in the US. You aint's seen nothing until you visit CIS. These 50000 graduates are really bad programmers (ditto for 100000 in Russia). 4) Obviously, with such a huge pool of programmers there are bound to be some who are really great. That's why Russia wins so many programming competitions. This doesn't mean that the other 99.9% of programmers are any good. So forget the stereotypes. Ukrainian/Russian programmers suck. 5) You need good management to do this kind of business and the business education in Ukraine is basically as bad as IT education. 6) Ukraine doesn't have good image abroad and noone really does anything to change it, so it would be hard to persuade the prospecting clients.
So the only possible result is that the IT industry in Ukraine will remain quite small and insignificant in the international market. Sad, but true. Ditto for Russia.
Slashdot Mirror
More tired bullshit about uncanny valley... Thanks.
The facts are different. One, there was no research whatsoever that would demonstrate that people generally consider almost-but-not-quite photrealistic CGI "creepy". Such research was simply not done and all you have are your own personal opinions that you didn't like some movie and think it's creepy.
Two, there have been a grand total of TWO films that were done using photrealistic CGI actors. One - Final Fantasy, and two - Polar Express. You simply can't make any conclusions based on just two films. Also, both movies had a plethora of other problems that might have been responsible for their relative lack of success. For example, Final Fantasy had a story, which is typical for Japanese anime, but unfamiliar to general American moviegoing public. Polar Express was a Christmas story - those usually have limited box office prospects - and it was released similtaneously with Incredibles, backed by the strength of Pixar brand.
Three, a lot of people liked these two photorealistic movies. They were not complete flops and even though their box office revenues left something to be desired, this can be simply explaned by the fact that they had to invest a lot in developing and perfecting the technology. If not for this factor, both Final Fantasy and Polar Express would have easily been commercial successes. In particular, Polar Express is very popular with children and young teenagers, it was rated 4 stars by Roger Ebert, who was otherwise a proponent of this unscientific "uncanny valley" theory and some people who have seen it in IMAX report it as the best movie experience in their lives.
So in conclusion, Pixar's success probably has nothing to do with them staying outside of that mythical valley, and more to do with making quality films with good story. Seeing how they are willing to experiment with each new project, it is not unlikely that in a few years they would attempt to make a photorealistic computer animated film.
In present day Russia the strictness of laws is compensated by the laxity of their enforcement. Anarchy has its benefits. :)
The robots are different. We are finally on the edge of creating "perfect predators", robotic creatures that have a range of tools to find, track, identify and destroy their targets. All that while working in teams, while using existing surveilance and communication tools. It would be simply impossible for natural species to evolve enough to survive.
In nature it's impossible for perfect predators to evolve, because a) their victims evolve with the same speed b) there is an energy tradeoff - it's better to be just a good predator so that you don't waste your energy on extremely difficult cases. This is not true for artificial ones, since a) we are talking about design + evolution b) the energy can be gotten externally.
Actually this isn't true at all. When you are that high you can step outside the space station and you will hover indefinitely. To get down you need to get rid of the energy you have, and to do it you need to climb back, which will take basically the same time. :)
There are plans to make a "release" version of Wikipedia, by selecting a subset of articles, factchecking, peerreviewing them and then freezing them in a separate address space.
There are also plans for a system that would allow references to be integrated into the very fabric of articles much better than it's done now.
There are a lot of ideas and projects going on in Wikipedia. People there realise all the weaknesses Wikipedia currently has, but also understand that the Rome wasn't built in one day. Don't treat Wikipedia as finished yet, treat it as a work in progress, which just happens to already be useful for many purposes.
Also realise that there is no possible way that in 2030 there won't exist an open, free, authoritative and complete source of all human knowledge, accessible online from any place on this planet and some places beyond, that contains everything worthwhile that was ever written, the true sum of all human knowledge, constantly updated and checked. And if one has to guess, whether it will be based on Britannica or Wikipedia, I guess the latter looks slightly more likely.
Wikipedia process doesn't aim to always improve articles which each single edit. It only tries to improve aritles most of the time. Yes, in some unlucky cases, mistake can be introduced by people who honestly try to help, but in this case mistakes are fixed much more often than they are introduced.
Wikipedia single greatest problem is, without doubt, the antiquated American system of copyright, damned be those fucktards at Disney. The main reason why the quality of Wikipedia is not as high as one might have liked is because wikipedians need to create the whole encyclopedia from scratch, do it for free and because they chose to approach it on a wide front.
To mature, Wikipedia might need another decade. To mature only a subset of its articles through fact-checking and peer-review it might need 5 years or so. One must understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that it's provided AS IS. It doesn't claim to be better than Encarta or Britannica, if you don't like it, don't use it. However, the very openness and freedom ensured that it became popular. Even though it's not ready yet.
The same can be said about many open-source products - they are still in 0.9, but many people find it good enough to use them in production settings.
Wikipedia is already good enough and there is no way it's gonna get worse. Eventually we'll have AI read the digitized references and check and crosscheck the facts. But for now it's good enough and what's better, it's free, open and more up-to-date than many alternatives.
It you who don't get it. By choosing b or d you mostly send EA the message "I don't like your games, they are shit". This says nothing to them about your dislike for their treatment of the programmers. By choosing c you tell them "You make good games, but there are reasons why I feel uncomfortable paying you, please change".
If you chose b or d, they might think that their games are not good enough and need more features. This might in turn lead to 90 hour weeks and would harm the programmers even more. Choose responsibly. Chose piracy.
I meant it's not important whether we consider it "on Internet" or not. :)
The truth is that "In capitalism everyone gets their own incentives".
When I was a kid, I read a book about the search for Atlantis. Among other cool things there was a world map illustrating where different authors had put it in their papers/books. Let me tell you, the whole world was covered in little dots, including the middle of Sahara and The Himalaya! You can check some of the ideas at Wikipedia.
I dunno, really... I like it more online, 'cause I can use technological solution to solve problems and they work. In Real World I have to watch on the ads, because I can't walk with my eyes closed. I have to listen to ads on radio when it's playing in public places. But in the comfort of my home, on my PC I am almost completely safe from intrusive ads. AtGuard! and Proxomitron remove all and any adverts. The only drawbacks are that the page layout is mangled sometimes when I remove a huge banner and that ads on some minor sites can get through.
Really, I like it better online. Can't wait for Augmented Reality glasses that would do the same for real world.
The data on the Internet obviously doesn't include all data on the harddrives of the users. I don't make all my files available online and what I make available is usually redundant. But it's not like it's really that important...
The point is - shopping as an activity is stupid anyway. You waste your time and a bit of your soul (if there was such a thing) every time you go inside a Wal-Mart. Doing some creative stuff like feeding junk info into the database is not a waste of time - it's fun, it helps maintain your sanity and there is nothing wrong with that. It's not like you should be productive every single second of your life.
You forget that if you collected all the HDDs of the Internet users, copied this onto one huge virtual disk and zipped it, after a few years you would probably end up with a rather small file. You see, I have almost 0.5TByte of data on my PC, but only about 20 Gb of it is unique (5Gb of personal photos, 5Gb of documents, 7Gb of some films I was editing, 2Gb of game save files, etc.). The rest are programs that are installed on thousands (millions?) of other computers, movies, music and picture that are on many other computers, etc.
:)
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has 430Tb of unique, non-repeating (mostly) data.
Of course, all such comparisions are moot. For example, assuming Sims 2 sold 4 million copies, there is 1 petabyte of saves files, that are (albeit somewhat similar) unique to each user! What is more valuable, interesting and important - half a petabyte of Wal-Mart data containing purchasing history of basically every American citizen, a petabyte of data containing fictionous suburban neighbourhoods populated with simplistic simulated game characters or a petabyte of sattelite images of Earth? Petabytes are not born equal.
Most links are probably in Russian. I would be glad to find some references in English, the problem is I get terribly depressed when I read about this stuff and immediately want to "kill them all" or something. :)
So much needs to be written, but I will avoid the impulse to start writing a comprehensive 10-page treatise on the problem and will give only some of the most important reasons.
1) Our government are a bunch of traitor sell-outs. Sad, but true. It goes beyond incompetence when government spendings on science decrease each and every year since 1991, and when the spendings on one school pupil per GPD per capita in Russia are 2nd lowest in the world (the lowest is Nigeria or Zimbabwe, don't remember which).
2) Economic collapse was horrible. Production in Russia dropped 50% (Great Depression was about 30%), Russia is still worse off than it was in 1989. Other former Soviet Republics are even worse... sometimes much worse (with the exception of Baltic states).
3) The stratification is horrible. 10% richest people get 15 more money than 10% poorest.
4) Government employees (doctors, teachers, university professors) were hit the worst. A significant fraction of them had income below poverty line. Once I was paid 10$/month for teaching (doing it probably better than any of the hundreds of teachers there ever could) financial management to 150 students in a large, well-known, supposedly prestigeous university. This created problems, which cannot be easily fixed, even now, when some professors can finally earn enough.
5) Formalism crept into schools. It became hard to do the job well, but as long as you took care about all formalities (students attended, exams passed, that kind of stuff), you were fine. This spread to students too - as long as you write and present a paper, you pass, even when the whole paper was copy-pasted from an internet page and you don't understand a single fucking sentence that is written there.
6) Education in schools degraded and now 1st year students don't know how to read and understand texts, they can't express themselves, they don't know basic math, they don't know anything about other disciplines. Still, they may have excellent grades and it appears that everything is fine.
7) People irrationally continued to believe that they still have the best education system in the world that Soviet Union had. It's no longer true, but people found it more comfortable to beleive this lie than to realise the horrible truth and do something.
8) Teachers lost qualification or left schools. With low pay and no motivation to work well you got mostly poor performers.
9) It's impossible to change anything if you are alone, and
10) Nobody cares. Or at least it looks this way.
11) In Venezuela President Chavez opened a school in his palace to do something to improve the education and to show that he cared. The fucking abomination that Russia has for president had both his bastard girls studying in Europe. How much does he care? The criminals governing other xUSSR countries care even less (see [1]).
This is a gist of the sad story that is education in former USSR republics. Needless to say, with 200 million people living there, there are some places where the situation is good, some where it's even great, but overall it's exactly as I described.
Theoretically I can, but mostly you just have to take my word for it, because I live in Russia, know enough to understand how the political and economican mechanisms work in CIS, because many of my classmates work in offshore programming (because I graduated from math school), because I taught in a university and know firsthand how corrupt and rotten the system is, because I worked as a financial analyst in technology sector of an investment bank here, etc., etc. Just take my word for it, Ukraine will NOT become a notable player in the global IT market.
It should have been obvious, but I'll say it. There are four basic strategies:
a) Buy EA games
b) Don't get any games
c) Pirate EA games
d) Buy competitor's games
For EA, a > c > b > d
Any strategy other than a is possible to use to send EA a message. Of course, d would be the most effective, but c is effective too.
Sorry, but if you use this meaning, you need to stop making conclusions about sales from this "marketshare". It doesn't logically follow that Microsoft has huge sales of its office software in Russia from the fact that MS Office has a 90% "marketshare" there and almost every computer has some office software.
You should use the term "mindshare" to avoid confusion. If we stop buying EA games and start pirating them, the products will continue to be popular but they will stop bringing EA money. And as much as they may enjoy the amazing popularity of their games, ultimately they care more about money, so pirating its games is a valid tactic for harming Electronic Arts.
Not directly, perhaps. But there are reasons to believe that if they couldn't use this monopoly to shove this overpriced "junk" towards our collective throats, the business model would have to change towards lower prices, which would mean significant changes to current marketing practices (and business practices in general). For example, imagine that labels had to make profit on each and every artist to survive.
Of course, it's very hard to predict what changes would result from the destruction of this "cartel". And it's equally hard to even tell how it should be destroyed. What exactly the RIAA does that is so bad for the customers and the industry? I don't know, but I know that the industry is not healthy, it's outright rotten. Any change would be for the better and one consequence would be the ability of some labels to sell quality cheap music.
Of course, 1900s workers would be glad to have the kind of job game developers have today, even if they had to work 100 hours a week. But when we judge the situation of EA programmers by modern standards we realise that their conditons are still inhumane. In that sense, I guess, we can call them "the proletarians of the 21st century" or something...
The problem is not what you describe, the problem is that in almost every Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldavian (add the rest of the CIS) university only 5% of students are worth anything. This doesn't mean that 95% of students who are not good in CS/IT/programming/whatever you call it will be good in something else, this means they will still attend the lectures (if even that) in the CS department, but will learn nothing (spelled N-O-T-H-I-N-G). So in the end only 5% of all graduates have any skills and knowledge worth speaking of. Which means that of all graduates only 0.2% will be good programmers, 0.2% will be good managers, etc. And 90-95% will be stupid illiterates who are only capable of a low-level (in the US that would be flipping burgers, in CIS there aren't as many burger joints to employ them).
:] most people aren't as lucky).
Education is xUSSR is really fucked up now and I know what I am talking about (though I was lucky to get exceptionally good education
Romania is not Ukraine. In Ukraine they may teach students about graphs and minimum spanning trees, but with no students understanding what the hell this means, not asking questions, then pretending they do a project and pass an exam, without actually knowing ANYTHING in the end. This is not an understatement, that's exactly how it works for 95% or the students.
My view on this is that this huge potential will remain just that - potential, without translating into anything tangible, like a huge booming offshore programming industry like in India.
There are many reasons for this, but I'll list the main ones only:
1) The government doesn't give a squat about programming industry or economy in general. They won't care about it unless there are some money to be had for them. It won't happen unless the industry magically develops by itself and even then will only be to its detriment.
2) Yes, Ukraine is better than most other CIS countries, but that only means they are neck-deep in shit instead of being totally submerged like Uzbekistan, Kyrgistan, Tajikistan and other whateverstans. Ukraine is worse off than Russia and that's saying something.
3) These graduates aren't good. You all know about problems in American educational system, but in Ukraine (and other CIS countries) people who graduate from schools are often simply functionally illiterate. They are just going through the motions without actually learning or understanding anything. You may think cheating and grade inflation became problems in the US. You aint's seen nothing until you visit CIS. These 50000 graduates are really bad programmers (ditto for 100000 in Russia).
4) Obviously, with such a huge pool of programmers there are bound to be some who are really great. That's why Russia wins so many programming competitions. This doesn't mean that the other 99.9% of programmers are any good. So forget the stereotypes. Ukrainian/Russian programmers suck.
5) You need good management to do this kind of business and the business education in Ukraine is basically as bad as IT education.
6) Ukraine doesn't have good image abroad and noone really does anything to change it, so it would be hard to persuade the prospecting clients.
So the only possible result is that the IT industry in Ukraine will remain quite small and insignificant in the international market. Sad, but true. Ditto for Russia.