I agree with the premise that people are buying fewer games because of sequelitis and the general lack of originality, but what's more interesting to me is, why has the industry in general gotten less innovative? I think a big part of it is because of the skyrocketing costs of making a game. In the 80s, one or two guys could make a game in a matter of months. Now you need teams of dozens (if not hundreds) of professionals, not to mention higher costs for marketing, development and content creation tools, etc.
It seems like the increased capabilities of game systems these days has caused the cost of making a game to grow exponentially, while only giving us linear improvements in the quality of the games themselves. Investors are much more likely to fund a game based on a known property (a sequel, a sports game, a movie knockoff...) than something totally original from out of the blue. It's much more difficult to recoup the costs of making a game than it used to be, so gambling on an unknown quantity has far worse consequences than it did back in the day.
I have a feeling that a lot of the future growth and innovation in the market is going to come from handheld systems (due to lower development costs), and from companies like Nintendo who aren't so concerned with milking every last polygon from the hardware, but are more focused on innovations in gameplay.
No, you're still not using the word correctly. Javascript Object Notation is also a standard, as evidenced by the fact that you can go to www.json.org and read a complete description it. You're using the term 'standard' as in 'standard practices' or 'standard operating procedure', where 'standard' means 'common' or 'widespread'. This is about 'standard' as in 'a public specification'.
Take the network protocol used for Windows filesharing. In the sense that you're using the term, that's a standard, by virtue of the fact that 90+% of the PCs in the world have support for it. In the sense used in the article (and the discussion), it's totally nonstandard. The Samba project had to reverse-engineer much of it, and continues to do so.
I totally agree. Also, sure, the business degree will still be "good" in 20 years, but that also means that you'd spend the next 20+ years working the kind of job that requires a business degree. I don't want those jobs, I'm much happier as a programmer.
Anyone who wants to make the transition from engineering to management can always go back for an MBA (a technical degree plus an MBA is worth a heck of a lot more than a business degree plus an MBA).
Single letter variables are common in numeric and scientific code, it's an old FORTRAN convention. You have to declare variables in FORTRAN, but there are also predefined variables with single-letter names (one range of letters are integers, the rest are floats, I believe). Also, if you ever read "Numerical Recipes in C", you'll notice it a LOT (most or all of the code is a direct translation from the original FORTRAN).
I won't say it's a good thing, but it's also not always a sign of an amateur programmer. In this case it's probably the product of some math PhD, where the only programming he ever does is numerics in f95 or something. So I have faith in the quality of their code, but it's still annoying.
I wouldn't call it horrible at all- it's just very specialized towards certain tasks. It definitely wouldn't make a good general-purpose programming language, but it's a fantastic tool for the things it was designed to do. Saying MATLAB sucks as a general-purpose programming language is sort of like saying VHDL sucks for writing word processors. There's a few things I don't like about it, but it's also saved my butt on many, many occasions.
Anecdotal evidence: I work in remote sensing, mostly image processing apps using data from airborne sensors. The sensors are mostly experimental, and the image processing stuff is very researchy. We use MATLAB all the time- I honestly think if we used C++ (or pretty much anything other than MATLAB) during the algorithm development stages, it would take us literally 5-7 times as long to do anything, and in the end we would not have pursued nearly as many paths of research or done nearly as much analysis of our results. I don't know what it's like in other fields of engineering, but I know a ton of people who work in signal and image processing that would say the exact same thing.
I once struggled with one particularly tough problem for almost a year- I was developing in C++ at the time, since that was what the final implementation would be in. Again, this wasn't just implementing something that was well-understood...this was also researching new algorithms and doing lots of experimentation with lots of different datasets. After a year I got exasperated and and decided to develop the algorithms in MATLAB first. I reimplemented all the C++ stuff I had already done in the previous year, in about 1 month [!]. In another month I had a working system, much to my amazement. In another month I had tested and analyzed the living crap out of it in ways that I wouldn't have dreamt if I was still trying to do things in C++.
The only real competitor to MATLAB in this field is
IDL
(not to be confused with Interface Definition Language- you gotta love overloaded acronyms). In the open source world, you've got Octave, SciLab, and SciPy, but I think SciPy has the best shot at weaning people off MATLAB. So far I don't think any of the open source alternatives are quite mature enough for my purposes, but they're getting there. In my (rather specialized) field, Mathcad and Mathematica aren't contenders, for whatever reason.
In conclusion: as a programming language, it can seem a little odd (for instance, all variables are matrices). It's better to think of it as an interactive mathematical prototyping environment designed around a very specialized language. But if you have a need for that kind of tool, it can be a really amazing timesaver.
Seriously- what would switching to Linux buy these guys? They might save a few thousand on development tools and OS upgrades every few years, but that's pocket change for most companies. They have a solution that works that they're happy with, and switching over would be a huge time and money sink (rewrite a lot of code, migrate all their users to new machines, etc.). That might not sound like much to you but there can be endless complications. Considering that their present setup works fine for them, what's the point?
What if you had some piece of software, say with a codebase of half a million lines of code, that had been tested and debugged to hell and back. Alas, it's in some slightly older programming language. Then a bunch of consultants come along and tell you that you need to rewrite it all in some flashy new programming language, for basically no other reason than they think flashy new language is much cooler than slightly older language. That would be pretty stupid, right? Well, that's what nearly all of the responses to this guy sound like.
I use Linux quite a bit at work and at home, and have been instrumental in getting OSS tools more widely used at work. Along the way I've had to do a lot of serious thinking about what the best tool for the job was, and debate all kinds of people (with a lot more years of experience than me) about why we should go one way and not the other. I recommend some open source solution and the hardcore MS people resist the crap out of it. I recommend a proprietary solution and a bunch of other people think I've gone insane. In all cases I did boatloads of research and suggested what looked to be the best tool for the job. The main conclusion I drew from all of this is, the more black and white someone thinks these issues are, the less clueful they are. Your Linux advocacy is the product of just as much of a herd mentality as those with MS-only blinders (which is definitely not the original poster, but you flamed him anyway).
I think the issue isn't that all of these supposedly highly educated people can't write...I've worked with many people who were very articulate in print but always sent out emails that looked like they were written by a hyperactive 12-year-old. I think the issue is that it just doesn't register with a lot of people that their emails SHOULD be grammatically correct and have a good flow to them.
I totally disagree and always try and write decent email, but unfortunately a lot of people take the same attitude towards email that they take towards IM...as long as its just barely good enough to kinda sorta communicate whatever they were trying to communicate, then it's OK. They don't think about the impression it makes on other people.
We (technical types) tend to think email should be written with the same care as papers and snail mail, whereas to a lot of other people it's just a less responsive form of IMing. It's a peeve of mine, but there's not really anything anyone can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like the increased capabilities of game systems these days has caused the cost of making a game to grow exponentially, while only giving us linear improvements in the quality of the games themselves. Investors are much more likely to fund a game based on a known property (a sequel, a sports game, a movie knockoff...) than something totally original from out of the blue. It's much more difficult to recoup the costs of making a game than it used to be, so gambling on an unknown quantity has far worse consequences than it did back in the day.
I have a feeling that a lot of the future growth and innovation in the market is going to come from handheld systems (due to lower development costs), and from companies like Nintendo who aren't so concerned with milking every last polygon from the hardware, but are more focused on innovations in gameplay.
Take the network protocol used for Windows filesharing. In the sense that you're using the term, that's a standard, by virtue of the fact that 90+% of the PCs in the world have support for it. In the sense used in the article (and the discussion), it's totally nonstandard. The Samba project had to reverse-engineer much of it, and continues to do so.
Anyone who wants to make the transition from engineering to management can always go back for an MBA (a technical degree plus an MBA is worth a heck of a lot more than a business degree plus an MBA).
I won't say it's a good thing, but it's also not always a sign of an amateur programmer. In this case it's probably the product of some math PhD, where the only programming he ever does is numerics in f95 or something. So I have faith in the quality of their code, but it's still annoying.
Anecdotal evidence: I work in remote sensing, mostly image processing apps using data from airborne sensors. The sensors are mostly experimental, and the image processing stuff is very researchy. We use MATLAB all the time- I honestly think if we used C++ (or pretty much anything other than MATLAB) during the algorithm development stages, it would take us literally 5-7 times as long to do anything, and in the end we would not have pursued nearly as many paths of research or done nearly as much analysis of our results. I don't know what it's like in other fields of engineering, but I know a ton of people who work in signal and image processing that would say the exact same thing.
I once struggled with one particularly tough problem for almost a year- I was developing in C++ at the time, since that was what the final implementation would be in. Again, this wasn't just implementing something that was well-understood...this was also researching new algorithms and doing lots of experimentation with lots of different datasets. After a year I got exasperated and and decided to develop the algorithms in MATLAB first. I reimplemented all the C++ stuff I had already done in the previous year, in about 1 month [!]. In another month I had a working system, much to my amazement. In another month I had tested and analyzed the living crap out of it in ways that I wouldn't have dreamt if I was still trying to do things in C++.
The only real competitor to MATLAB in this field is IDL (not to be confused with Interface Definition Language- you gotta love overloaded acronyms). In the open source world, you've got Octave, SciLab, and SciPy, but I think SciPy has the best shot at weaning people off MATLAB. So far I don't think any of the open source alternatives are quite mature enough for my purposes, but they're getting there. In my (rather specialized) field, Mathcad and Mathematica aren't contenders, for whatever reason.
In conclusion: as a programming language, it can seem a little odd (for instance, all variables are matrices). It's better to think of it as an interactive mathematical prototyping environment designed around a very specialized language. But if you have a need for that kind of tool, it can be a really amazing timesaver.
What if you had some piece of software, say with a codebase of half a million lines of code, that had been tested and debugged to hell and back. Alas, it's in some slightly older programming language. Then a bunch of consultants come along and tell you that you need to rewrite it all in some flashy new programming language, for basically no other reason than they think flashy new language is much cooler than slightly older language. That would be pretty stupid, right? Well, that's what nearly all of the responses to this guy sound like.
I use Linux quite a bit at work and at home, and have been instrumental in getting OSS tools more widely used at work. Along the way I've had to do a lot of serious thinking about what the best tool for the job was, and debate all kinds of people (with a lot more years of experience than me) about why we should go one way and not the other. I recommend some open source solution and the hardcore MS people resist the crap out of it. I recommend a proprietary solution and a bunch of other people think I've gone insane. In all cases I did boatloads of research and suggested what looked to be the best tool for the job. The main conclusion I drew from all of this is, the more black and white someone thinks these issues are, the less clueful they are. Your Linux advocacy is the product of just as much of a herd mentality as those with MS-only blinders (which is definitely not the original poster, but you flamed him anyway).
What are sum/product types? Just curious.
I think the issue isn't that all of these supposedly highly educated people can't write...I've worked with many people who were very articulate in print but always sent out emails that looked like they were written by a hyperactive 12-year-old. I think the issue is that it just doesn't register with a lot of people that their emails SHOULD be grammatically correct and have a good flow to them.
I totally disagree and always try and write decent email, but unfortunately a lot of people take the same attitude towards email that they take towards IM...as long as its just barely good enough to kinda sorta communicate whatever they were trying to communicate, then it's OK. They don't think about the impression it makes on other people.
We (technical types) tend to think email should be written with the same care as papers and snail mail, whereas to a lot of other people it's just a less responsive form of IMing. It's a peeve of mine, but there's not really anything anyone can do about it.