Off the cuff, I can only cite my personal experience, in which I have vetted dozens of "serious brainstorms" over the years, most do not get produced, and it's about 1 in 4 (in my space) that is let pass due to inability to protect against IP theft. Maybe one in 20 goes to production, I'm still waiting on "the big one" that will make us all rich and famous.
But... the world runs on promotion and sales. I'd much rather put all the lawyers at the bottom of the ocean than the salesmen, salesmen are at least fun to hang out with.
I have dabbled in visual arts, and the only thing that is keeping my from "making money" with my art is me. I don't invest enough time and effort in promotion. Art doesn't sell itself, it sells when it is promoted - the ways to promote art are as varied as art itself (well, maybe not, but still, there are many), without promotion, art rarely sells itself.
Oh, this triggered a memory of an answer to the age old question: "What is art?" - Art is that which did not need to be done: the scrollwork on a chair leg, the unified smoothness of an iPhone, the black velvet Elvis painting...
School lasts 6 hours a day, which is a pretty big chunk of time. And a lot of that time is spent turning kids into uncreative conformist machines - if they resist that then they label them ADHD and drug the creativity out of them instead.
There is tremendous pressure to drug your children into conformity - if they are any kind of problem, the school becomes a huge problem for the parents. Drugs are the easy out - the schools don't mention them often, but it's always there: "just drug your kids into passivity and we won't bother you anymore."
BS. My three kids (15, 12, 9) are encouraged to express their creativity in ways that I was never allowed when I was their age. In fact, I get a little frustrated that their teachers focus so much on creativity and 'thinking outside the box' that they forget about things like spelling and grammar.
YMMV, around here in any given elementary school you may have 4 teachers per grade level, and the experience your child has varies wildly just by which one of those 4 they are assigned to.
There is no creativity required or recommended on these exams
So what? School only lasts a few hours a day....
Creativity is declining because parents are washing their hands of the responsibility to shape the minds of their own kids. You don't get an inquisitive, creative mind at school - you arrive at school with one.
School is where kids get "non-parent" time, where they start to leave the nest and define themselves on their own terms. It is a necessary part of maturation in modern society. And, even though it only lasts a few hours a day, it can do tremendous damage in that short time. As a parent, you can do wonderful things with your kids at home, after work, before bed, on the weekends, during the summer, and, still, school can seriously mess things up - and this is talking about parents who care.
TFA is talking about broad demographic trends, and as you point out, typical parents don't care or do much to foster creativity or education outside school. In the US, NCLB is a systematic crushing of creativity from the top, funding is based on test scores and administrations above the classroom level are driven by funding, period. They may have been caring human beings once, and they're still expected to show that face, but if they don't get the funding job done, they don't keep their position.
Funding is based on 99% of the school showing passing scores and/or positive progress on the tests. The administrators around here go on "FCAT lockdown" no special programs or visiting parents allowed in hallways during testing. They discontinue art and music classes year round because that's not on the test. Oh, and if you're in that slice that's perceived to not be capable of passing the test, human garbage is too kind a term for how you're treated - separated and locked in a specially funded classroom away from the rest of the population year round, lest you might distract from their test performance (or, expose the "normal" students to any diversity of abilities.)
The founding Father's statement that "All men are created equal" has been twisted into perverse attempts to create a mono-culture of homo sapiens, not the Ayrian master race variety, but that no matter what we look like, we all can play ball like Michael Jordan if we just practice enough, or establish new Physics like Einstein if we just study hard enough. The NCLB standards aren't set at Jordan-Einstein levels of performance, far from it, but they are promising to withhold federal funding unless every student meets the standards - any wonder why we're turning into a dull bunch of drones?
The real damage caused by piracy aren't the works which were created and then failed to produce return on investment (this is all to easy to do without piracy), the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant. The poster is all concerned with "provably," but really, if you sit down with any group of investors and propose a new creative project, the provable effect of piracy is when the investors walk away from a project because they won't get their money back before pirates saturate their market with ripoffs.
Even in patented space many works (especially medical devices) struggle to make a profit before patent protection runs out. Patents are more beneficial to the world at large in this respect - ideas which can be realized in a reasonable time are pursued, and then within 20 years they become public domain. The effective infinite life of Copyright is wrong on so many levels. I think a reasonably time limited copyright scheme would be more respected / less violated, and more productive in the creation of new works, as opposed to the infinite repackaging of existing brands that we have today.
Hey Mr. Optomist, try the Nokia SDK 1.0 - it was taking forever to download, so I aborted it, but then I obviously don't want to write apps for Symbian as badly as you do. The blogs do point out that the SDK is still "rough around the edges" when compared with Qt Creator for desktop apps, but I think you might actually get "Hello World" running in the SDK.
a reasonably large base of professional Mac developers around before the iPhone
Yeah, in absolute terms, if you put them all in a stadium, it would look like a reasonably large group of people. In percentage terms, I don't think Mac developers even represented 1% of the developer community, before iPhone came out.
"Loss of culture" isn't necessarily a bad thing. The collective memory shouldn't have to carry every episode of I Love Lucy forever, most things should fade into obscurity. I'm not saying that copyright law is good or a necessary tool to make this happen, but if every third grade play ever made is recorded, archived, indexed and readily available to whomever wants to do a PhD thesis on evolution of the third grade perspective of Jack and the Beanstalk across the centuries... is that really the highest and best use of anyone's time?
I prefer a more traditional approach: tax their assets out of existence. Start slow, 0.1% on profit, and double it every quarter until any transaction not held for at least 24 hours is paying 10% of profits toward roads, police, fire safety, military security and public healthcare. Oh, sorry, that would be UnAmerican, wouldn't it?
you kill roughly 90% of the power consumption. When I was single, had no clothes dryer (hang on a line, what a concept!), clock cycled the water heater on for 30 minutes a day, and the weather didn't require A/C, I would have power bills that charged more for the fixed rate "customer charge" than they did for consumption. Add one wife, 2 kids and 2000 square feet, now we think that $300/month is a "good" bill.
It's been a year? Yeah, I meant to fire up the TV in antenna mode and see if we get anything worthwhile, but I just haven't gotten around to that yet. When we signed up for Broadband via Cable, they added basic analog TV service (10 channels) for $3/month (after decoding all the packages and their net effects on the bill), so we took the 10 channels and might watch 10 hours a year - $3.60 an hour still seems kind of high for the cra- that we do end up watching via broadcast, especially if we can get those channels digitally via antenna now, on the other hand, it's hardly 2 weekend hours better spent doing other things to mess around with it.
Netflix for the win, we do "watch it instantly" while traveling more than we watch in-room cable TV service.
So, when I gave my old WiFi router to a friend on the other side of town, it messed with their accuracy a bit then? I think they've driven by my house about once in the past 4 years as far as I can tell from the StreetView photos.
I just brought up "the pad" because it's the latest sales sensation, recently passing 2M units. My main point was that when things are produced in the millions, it is usually done in batches across a period of time, and each batch tends to be redesigned / optimized based on current market conditions.
Whoever wrote the horrid MP3 browsing / playing code that appeared on every cheap (and not-so-cheap) DVD player from 2003-2008 will rot in a special hell, that was some widely distributed crapware.
I use Qt, write once (in C++), deploy on Windows, Mac, Linux, Symbian, and any number of embedded systems - with native look and feel, and C++ speed.
I worked for a "visionary" in 2006 who wanted to start an Objective-C shop, he didn't listen to me when I told him that assimilation into Windows was highly probable - it took 6 months before he realized resistance was futile (not to me, but to the industry at large.) Luckily, we stuck with Qt and the port from OS-X to Windows took about one man-week (lots of OpenGL code that wasn't 100% cross-platform).
Over the last 4 years, Qt has been stable enough that things I wrote to version 4.1 are still compiling (properly) with no modifications in 4.6... that's pretty impressive when compared to other development environments I have worked in.
Apple _might_ build 10M iPads before the design is completely revamped. The number of single design quantity 10M products out there is surprisingly small - it takes years to sell/install that many of anything, over those years the design tends to get "optimized" several times. A good system will maintain software compatibility across the generations, but most stuff is useless after 10 years.
I "lived it" once back in 1996, the then C compilers were pushing out about 2x the performance of the then C++ compilers for similar tasks. Of course, it's always an apples to oranges comparison, but our ported C++ app performed at 1/2 the speed of it's C predecessor (same programmer on both).
Compilers have improved, hopefully that gap has narrowed. Five years earlier, the C++ compilers for PCs couldn't produce stable executables (and the hardware I had access to that had "stable" C++ compilers - a big mainframe - was itself down half the time... blame the admin, but it was still unaccessable to the users.)
For me, the ease of development in C++ is why I'm there (in Qt libraries, now.) Even if the code runs at 1/2 speed, it's worth it when the development time is cut by 50% (or more).
When I started programming for a paycheck in 1991, there were no viable C++ compilers for the obscure underpowered platform known as the IBM PC.
We switched to using C++ for our applications in 1996, more because of the need for GUI integration than because the language did anything magical for our algorithms.
Oh, and at that time, we suffered about a 50% performance hit, even with "cleaning up" our algorithms moving from a 6 year old unplanned C code base to a freshly planned C++ structure. The performance hit was more or less irrelevant, the old code (had a GUI, but) ran in DOS, the new code ran native in Win95, we needed to be in Win95 - resistance was futile.
I think the gcc can benefit from STL containers and such, not that they don't have solutions for all that already coded in C, but switching to the standard ones will make things a bit easier for non gcc veterans to grok, and they should benefit from massive parallelization more easily if they are using standard libraries instead of retooling their old code base for it.
I'm assuming that any addition of C++ code will be tested against the existing implementations for performance, and if it is seriously lacking, the existing implementation will be kept until the C++ code can be "brought up to speed."
Slashdot Mirror
Off the cuff, I can only cite my personal experience, in which I have vetted dozens of "serious brainstorms" over the years, most do not get produced, and it's about 1 in 4 (in my space) that is let pass due to inability to protect against IP theft. Maybe one in 20 goes to production, I'm still waiting on "the big one" that will make us all rich and famous.
But... the world runs on promotion and sales. I'd much rather put all the lawyers at the bottom of the ocean than the salesmen, salesmen are at least fun to hang out with.
I have dabbled in visual arts, and the only thing that is keeping my from "making money" with my art is me. I don't invest enough time and effort in promotion. Art doesn't sell itself, it sells when it is promoted - the ways to promote art are as varied as art itself (well, maybe not, but still, there are many), without promotion, art rarely sells itself.
Oh, this triggered a memory of an answer to the age old question: "What is art?" - Art is that which did not need to be done: the scrollwork on a chair leg, the unified smoothness of an iPhone, the black velvet Elvis painting...
School lasts 6 hours a day, which is a pretty big chunk of time. And a lot of that time is spent turning kids into uncreative conformist machines - if they resist that then they label them ADHD and drug the creativity out of them instead.
There is tremendous pressure to drug your children into conformity - if they are any kind of problem, the school becomes a huge problem for the parents. Drugs are the easy out - the schools don't mention them often, but it's always there: "just drug your kids into passivity and we won't bother you anymore."
> Where it is promptly beaten out of you.
BS. My three kids (15, 12, 9) are encouraged to express their creativity in ways that I was never allowed when I was their age. In fact, I get a little frustrated that their teachers focus so much on creativity and 'thinking outside the box' that they forget about things like spelling and grammar.
YMMV, around here in any given elementary school you may have 4 teachers per grade level, and the experience your child has varies wildly just by which one of those 4 they are assigned to.
There is no creativity required or recommended on these exams So what? School only lasts a few hours a day.... Creativity is declining because parents are washing their hands of the responsibility to shape the minds of their own kids. You don't get an inquisitive, creative mind at school - you arrive at school with one.
School is where kids get "non-parent" time, where they start to leave the nest and define themselves on their own terms. It is a necessary part of maturation in modern society. And, even though it only lasts a few hours a day, it can do tremendous damage in that short time. As a parent, you can do wonderful things with your kids at home, after work, before bed, on the weekends, during the summer, and, still, school can seriously mess things up - and this is talking about parents who care.
TFA is talking about broad demographic trends, and as you point out, typical parents don't care or do much to foster creativity or education outside school. In the US, NCLB is a systematic crushing of creativity from the top, funding is based on test scores and administrations above the classroom level are driven by funding, period. They may have been caring human beings once, and they're still expected to show that face, but if they don't get the funding job done, they don't keep their position.
Funding is based on 99% of the school showing passing scores and/or positive progress on the tests. The administrators around here go on "FCAT lockdown" no special programs or visiting parents allowed in hallways during testing. They discontinue art and music classes year round because that's not on the test. Oh, and if you're in that slice that's perceived to not be capable of passing the test, human garbage is too kind a term for how you're treated - separated and locked in a specially funded classroom away from the rest of the population year round, lest you might distract from their test performance (or, expose the "normal" students to any diversity of abilities.)
The founding Father's statement that "All men are created equal" has been twisted into perverse attempts to create a mono-culture of homo sapiens, not the Ayrian master race variety, but that no matter what we look like, we all can play ball like Michael Jordan if we just practice enough, or establish new Physics like Einstein if we just study hard enough. The NCLB standards aren't set at Jordan-Einstein levels of performance, far from it, but they are promising to withhold federal funding unless every student meets the standards - any wonder why we're turning into a dull bunch of drones?
If they have server stats, they could have locked the game via the server - their own damn fault for letting that easy technical solution get away.
Question I have is: how many of those 300K players would be playing if they had to pay even $1 for the game?
Next, find examples of works which are immense successes due to piracy - start with MS-DOS.
The real damage caused by piracy aren't the works which were created and then failed to produce return on investment (this is all to easy to do without piracy), the real damage is done in works which are never created in the first place due to the perception that piracy would make them financially irrelevant. The poster is all concerned with "provably," but really, if you sit down with any group of investors and propose a new creative project, the provable effect of piracy is when the investors walk away from a project because they won't get their money back before pirates saturate their market with ripoffs.
Even in patented space many works (especially medical devices) struggle to make a profit before patent protection runs out. Patents are more beneficial to the world at large in this respect - ideas which can be realized in a reasonable time are pursued, and then within 20 years they become public domain. The effective infinite life of Copyright is wrong on so many levels. I think a reasonably time limited copyright scheme would be more respected / less violated, and more productive in the creation of new works, as opposed to the infinite repackaging of existing brands that we have today.
Hey Mr. Optomist, try the Nokia SDK 1.0 - it was taking forever to download, so I aborted it, but then I obviously don't want to write apps for Symbian as badly as you do. The blogs do point out that the SDK is still "rough around the edges" when compared with Qt Creator for desktop apps, but I think you might actually get "Hello World" running in the SDK.
a reasonably large base of professional Mac developers around before the iPhone
Yeah, in absolute terms, if you put them all in a stadium, it would look like a reasonably large group of people. In percentage terms, I don't think Mac developers even represented 1% of the developer community, before iPhone came out.
"Loss of culture" isn't necessarily a bad thing. The collective memory shouldn't have to carry every episode of I Love Lucy forever, most things should fade into obscurity. I'm not saying that copyright law is good or a necessary tool to make this happen, but if every third grade play ever made is recorded, archived, indexed and readily available to whomever wants to do a PhD thesis on evolution of the third grade perspective of Jack and the Beanstalk across the centuries... is that really the highest and best use of anyone's time?
I prefer a more traditional approach: tax their assets out of existence. Start slow, 0.1% on profit, and double it every quarter until any transaction not held for at least 24 hours is paying 10% of profits toward roads, police, fire safety, military security and public healthcare. Oh, sorry, that would be UnAmerican, wouldn't it?
you kill roughly 90% of the power consumption. When I was single, had no clothes dryer (hang on a line, what a concept!), clock cycled the water heater on for 30 minutes a day, and the weather didn't require A/C, I would have power bills that charged more for the fixed rate "customer charge" than they did for consumption. Add one wife, 2 kids and 2000 square feet, now we think that $300/month is a "good" bill.
If the only way they expect me to get content onto the device is to go through iTunes, then I'm not buying.
I've had a MacBookPro since 2006, I wouldn't be surprised if it has played 1000 different discs by now, it has never played anything from iTunes.
It's been a year? Yeah, I meant to fire up the TV in antenna mode and see if we get anything worthwhile, but I just haven't gotten around to that yet. When we signed up for Broadband via Cable, they added basic analog TV service (10 channels) for $3/month (after decoding all the packages and their net effects on the bill), so we took the 10 channels and might watch 10 hours a year - $3.60 an hour still seems kind of high for the cra- that we do end up watching via broadcast, especially if we can get those channels digitally via antenna now, on the other hand, it's hardly 2 weekend hours better spent doing other things to mess around with it.
Netflix for the win, we do "watch it instantly" while traveling more than we watch in-room cable TV service.
They were using both SSID and MAC addresses collected from street view to enhance their location services.
So, when I gave my old WiFi router to a friend on the other side of town, it messed with their accuracy a bit then? I think they've driven by my house about once in the past 4 years as far as I can tell from the StreetView photos.
I just brought up "the pad" because it's the latest sales sensation, recently passing 2M units. My main point was that when things are produced in the millions, it is usually done in batches across a period of time, and each batch tends to be redesigned / optimized based on current market conditions.
Whoever wrote the horrid MP3 browsing / playing code that appeared on every cheap (and not-so-cheap) DVD player from 2003-2008 will rot in a special hell, that was some widely distributed crapware.
I use Qt, write once (in C++), deploy on Windows, Mac, Linux, Symbian, and any number of embedded systems - with native look and feel, and C++ speed.
I worked for a "visionary" in 2006 who wanted to start an Objective-C shop, he didn't listen to me when I told him that assimilation into Windows was highly probable - it took 6 months before he realized resistance was futile (not to me, but to the industry at large.) Luckily, we stuck with Qt and the port from OS-X to Windows took about one man-week (lots of OpenGL code that wasn't 100% cross-platform).
Over the last 4 years, Qt has been stable enough that things I wrote to version 4.1 are still compiling (properly) with no modifications in 4.6... that's pretty impressive when compared to other development environments I have worked in.
The chip vendors won't even send out a salesman if your projected volume is only 100k.
You must be exceptionally rude to them, I can't get them to stay away and our volume is sub-thousand.
Apple _might_ build 10M iPads before the design is completely revamped. The number of single design quantity 10M products out there is surprisingly small - it takes years to sell/install that many of anything, over those years the design tends to get "optimized" several times. A good system will maintain software compatibility across the generations, but most stuff is useless after 10 years.
100000 x 0.15 = $15K, that doesn't pay for very much of my time....
I "lived it" once back in 1996, the then C compilers were pushing out about 2x the performance of the then C++ compilers for similar tasks. Of course, it's always an apples to oranges comparison, but our ported C++ app performed at 1/2 the speed of it's C predecessor (same programmer on both).
Compilers have improved, hopefully that gap has narrowed. Five years earlier, the C++ compilers for PCs couldn't produce stable executables (and the hardware I had access to that had "stable" C++ compilers - a big mainframe - was itself down half the time... blame the admin, but it was still unaccessable to the users.)
For me, the ease of development in C++ is why I'm there (in Qt libraries, now.) Even if the code runs at 1/2 speed, it's worth it when the development time is cut by 50% (or more).
When I started programming for a paycheck in 1991, there were no viable C++ compilers for the obscure underpowered platform known as the IBM PC.
We switched to using C++ for our applications in 1996, more because of the need for GUI integration than because the language did anything magical for our algorithms.
Oh, and at that time, we suffered about a 50% performance hit, even with "cleaning up" our algorithms moving from a 6 year old unplanned C code base to a freshly planned C++ structure. The performance hit was more or less irrelevant, the old code (had a GUI, but) ran in DOS, the new code ran native in Win95, we needed to be in Win95 - resistance was futile.
I think the gcc can benefit from STL containers and such, not that they don't have solutions for all that already coded in C, but switching to the standard ones will make things a bit easier for non gcc veterans to grok, and they should benefit from massive parallelization more easily if they are using standard libraries instead of retooling their old code base for it.
I'm assuming that any addition of C++ code will be tested against the existing implementations for performance, and if it is seriously lacking, the existing implementation will be kept until the C++ code can be "brought up to speed."