Aye, and if those guys looked at their metrics, they'd see the number of people doing precisely that was increasing. When I get my friends to use Firefox, it is an "IE-Killer app." for two reasons: A) you can run Flash sites without the ActiveX warning coming up, and you can do so without enabling ActiveX controls. B) Adblock. If an ad provider decides "it's cool" to spray their ad across the content in a manner that interrupts my browsing, I will kill it. If it flashes and sparks and triggers a gran mal seizure, I will kill it. If it shills "free (spyware-enhanced)" smileys, I will kill it. Funny, I haven't blocked Google Ads yet, or most of the ad providers. But those that screw with me? Hell yeah! And if that hurts their bottom line, horror! They might have to adopt more civil advertising techniques!
So no, Adblock doesn't automatically block all ads: it empowers us to set the rules for fair web use.
Heck, you can probably make an 80/20 rule for it: 1) 80% of the time, users are interacting on 20% of the function.
Come to think of it, it's simpler than that: 2) 80% of the time, users want one of four functions. Oh yeah, and might as well throw in 3) with a button interface, users can "spatially remember" three distinct buttons without looking (or training). and 4) with a dial, that "spatial memory" becomes 5 discrete positions, and a whole mess of sweet intension/remission levels (=volume, tuning have much higher response times).
So design-wise, you want 5 dials maximum. Of those dials, four are fixed in function, and one changes the paradigm (and presumably some of the other dials' function). The main things anyone would want to do are there, and they're there at the first level.
If you wanted to have a similar arrangement with keys, you'd need between 10 and 25 keys. It would not make sense.
Dude, you'd need to exit the DOS game and do that trick. Much better to have two bases with twice the living quarters as what you need. At the end of the month, transfer your entire R&D staff from one to the other. Engineers/Scientists in transit don't get their salaries paid.
And you thought business travel was a bitch in your field.
Well, DeVry degrees are generally a joke and target of pity.
Heck, heavily advertised degree programs come in two sorts: Diploma Mills, which make their money by selling degrees with no value, and Turnover Engines, which make their money by enrolling people who subsequently drop out due to real life constraints, dissonance (it was harder than I expected) or disillusionment (I'm paying for what?).
A degree in video games is ideal for a Turnover Engine school: people think, "hey I like games, maybe I should work on them." They go to a course taught by an underpaid CS MA, and drop out: either they realize there's stuff like math and work involved and bail, or they engage the subject and realize that the degree is gonna be worthless.
However, there are some "serious" game schools, whose employees do get jobs in the industry. Read what people say about DigiPen, or, for example, the guy above me responding to this thread went to Full Sail. He also seems to like GuildHall. Look at where the graduates go, and how many of them. Also note what the students do while there: what courses are they taking?
There should be a difference between CS and Computer Game Design. A proper Computer Game Design course should apply CS theory to the fundamentally creative and collaborative endeavor of making games. So students should come out with a portfolio that demonstrates their capabilities individually and as members of teams. Again, go to those websites and download some student projects.
Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable operating systems.
Okay, sure.
A) Stores sold out of Windows XP B) MacOS is not cheaper C) OpenOffice in Linux is not faster than MSOffice (yet), and people keep sending Office-formatted files. D) Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft; but every time I go downtown, I see the dude who thought it'd be cool to put upper management in Leopard or Debian. I usually give him change too. E) No need to know what non-English terms like NDISWrapper are to use Vista. F) Specific hardware/software that runs only on Vista machines, you know, like games.
How are those for intelligent reasons? They ain't strong enough reasons for me, but if you want to call people "addicts" and "fanatics", yet insist there's no intelligent reason for buying into the Microsoft monopoly, then you'd best look in the mirror: fanatics and addicts of other OSs are not doing their market share any favors by ignoring the reasons for Microsoft's dominance.
That ain't a flame, and I still haven't seen touched a Vista machine.
Blog article links to another, dated February 2007 on how to hack a WEP network. Gee, 2 years ago Tomshardware had a tutorial, and by then it was already old news. ForceFieldWireless (among others) has had a "wifi paint" product on the market for years.
Not too useful for many people, I suppose. I mean, a properly secured wireless network with a sensible admin should be able to monitor break ins. For stuff you want to restrict on site, Cat-5 (or -6) works pretty well, and there's much less RF crap to shield.
Alright, I cut out a long, rambling philosophical discussion of the subject, explaining with charts and graphs why you're wrong. Instead, I'll cut to the chase. Think of it this way: if you turned slashdot karma back into a numeric value, and then gave the top 200 karma-laden users jobs as professional posters to news aggregators in general, those users would continue to whore slashdot, ignore the other sites, and establish a hierarchy based on the number of +5 slashdot posts, irrespective of their content.
Well, okay, so it wouldn't be much different. But if you told those guys, "hey, y'all don't need to subscribe to slashdot, why don't you go screw around with digg for a while," they would come back with, "we ain't paid to post on digg". Same here. We love to discuss ideas, and we do put stuff up on free sites hosted by universities. But we ain't paid for that. And the fact there's pressure to publish in the big journals, both in terms of jobs/research monies, and in terms of getting others to pay attention to ideas makes those publications more valuable. Heck, the fact that many institutions have stated recruitment/tenure/granting policies that require/count publications in certain journals makes those journals obligatory for the libraries of those institutions. And at that point, a publisher can start fleecing.
While analysts once liked to say that the Zune would take over the music player world in the same manner that Windows PCs engulfed the Mac, the situation was really not even remotely similar. Analysts had things entirely backwards.
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break!
How many analysts out there saw the Zunes Microsoft unveiled last fall and actually predicted a success? I'm sorry, I call BS, along with the claim that the iPod created the market for HD-based players. HD-players existed long before the iPod, and anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition.
I'm not saying the iPod didn't create a huge demand, and grab a large part of the exploding market, but let's not exaggerate things here.
Put another way, do we really need a pro-mac blog to provide a multi-part essay on why the Zune is not a success? I mean, this thing is as much a dog as the Apple ROKR!
Hey, the article only mentioned Full Sail and Guildhall. It didn't say nothin' about DigiPen.
While you can say, "DigiPen's been around for twenty years", or something like that, the same doesn't hold true for most games programs out there. For many schools around the country, having a "games program" is seen as a recruiting tool, and a way to bolster flagging CS enrollment ('cos no department likes to lose students). The same youthful lack of experience that makes 18-year-olds volunteer for the infantry drives a lot of these computer games programs: and the for-lots-of-profit ITT-class of $kool$ has started to take notice. These guys have lots of churn, and make their money by underpaying marginally qualified personnel to teach a textbook to students who are most likely to drop out after paying their tuition (when they realize there's real work involved).
Because with Windows, most of the time, that game will work. With all that pre-installed crap, it'll probably work badly, but it should run. Or, if it doesn't run, the Support people can drag the sucker out and frustrate 'em to the point where the user blames something else.
With a Linux install, that's a very quick (and angry) phone call.
Yes, the assumption that "any PC" is a "windows PC" is a big problem, and at the same time, it is a bit of a red herring: the assumption has no historical basis (15 years ago, a PC was not necessarily a windows box), and if you go in, determined that people believe that way, you're never going to change beliefs (and market share).
But, heck, what exactly lies behind this Linux drive? Most Linux users would have no problem assembling their PCs from scratch (and for less money) -- all the parts are top-notch, and those with any technical knowledge tend to view "support" as hassle you go through to get an RMA. I'm sure folks at Dell are asking themselves: "The Linux $***storm, does it represent real customers, or is it an ideologial crusade by a vocal minority, who wouldn't buy our stuff anyway?"
Well?
Okay, here's what I'd like to see: the option to buy a system that works with some decent version Linux, with everything I needed to run it, in the box. I don't need front-page real-estate, and I don't need bickering over particular installs.
Would I buy it? Probably not. If I'm gonna set up a PC to run Linux permanently, I'll follow the time-honored way of doing it: take some old PC parts I have lying around the house, put them together, curse and swear over the non-existent or crappy drivers, and have some frankenstein computer around the house.
Parent, and ABG below. It's true for just about every undergraduate field.
Undergraduate education has a few factors that drive the curriculum: one is enrollment (make it too hard, and nobody shows up; require everybody to take it, and everybody has to pass it), another is vocational preparation (what does the job market demand? or -- mixing enrollment and vocation -- what do the students think the job market demands?). The folks doing the teaching aren't really interested in either of these, and nor are the "good students".
The "vocational" side of university education has always been there, and it's always been looked down upon by the really sharp people. And, you know what? In spite of the political rhetoric you hear around the US and Europe, the students who "Hit it out of the park" career-wise, the big successes, the Googles, Netscapes, Yahoos, Nokias and so on, aren't the ones who stick to a vocational curriculum. The ones who just did what the course told them to do are the guys who end up seeing their Technical Support jobs get outsourced.
The "enrollment" issue is even more pernicious. No department wants to lose students -- since students are tied to money and power in the universities. So if a subject gets "less popular", the curriculum gets "easier" to boost retention.
University courses, like other forms of professional formation, do teach a major professional skill: that to achieve results you need to be willing to do lots of crap-work, and that a good job involves doing boring stuff much of the time. Outside of that, the true strength of universities is that you're given some good resources to play with, and are surrounded by smart, curious, interested people. Find your passion, pursue it, and don't sweat money or jobs. Any employer you'd want to work for will recognize your abilities.
Actually, your argument proves my point. If all you need to be successful in a HS history course is the ability to regurgitate what's in the textbook, that is because you had a crappy history teacher. Your HS experience sounds just like mine: decent math and science instruction and crappy humanities.
It's always about critical thinking. The logic, "well, the way we teach it in HS, it doesn't involve critical thinking; moreover, it doesn't get you a job; therefore it's unimportant." Is thus wrong on both counts: the first argument is the same as "well, in HS Biology the teachers teach Intelligent Design, which is completely without scientific merit. Therefore, there's no need to bring in real scientists to teach biology/" The "no money" argument begs the question: us the purpose of public education to help people get rich? Heck, public education isn't even vocational training: most of the jobs people do for life -- even those with science-oriented college degrees -- are learned in a matter of months. But to function as a member of society, and to have the apparatus to enjoy fully human existence, these are things that require a broad range of human skills.
Besides, we've all seen what happens when we let ourselves be ruled by people who think their plans will work even if they ignore science and history.
okay, fine. I have a Ph.D. in history. No, I didn't do it for the money.
But, you know what? Even a HS teacher with a BA in History is a rare thing. Hell, I went to a public HS (in the same county where public schools sought subsidies because the majority of their students spoke "Ebonics"), Math and Sciences were taught by Ph.D.s. History? That was taught by a guy known as "coach." English? We found ourselves being taught by a series of spent pieces of used jet trash who got pinned sophomore year at the sorority, engaged junior year, married at graduation, and divorced two years later. They hated students and they hated the education degree that made them deal with them.
Come to think of it, Coach deemed me unsuitable for AP History, and the sorority hags didn't want me anywhere near their honors courses. The only straight As I got were in Math and the Sciences, particularly the computer courses. So now I publish more in a year than my English teachers actually read, and I get paid to be a historian, whereas Coach didn't think I could hack Advanced Placement, and the only part of my HS education I use on a daily basis consists in foreign language education.
Now, ask yourself: how much math beyond algebra do most HS students need? Likewise for physics. Critical thinking skills are taught in history classes; effective communication in English. Foreign language courses are in themselves valuable.
You can put a dollar value on all these things, and if you did, you'd probably find out that, per student hour in the classroom, "soft skills" make more of a difference than the hard sciences.
So why should we favor math and the hard sciences? By all means, I'm for strengthening our HS system, but to pretend that we need to spend more money to attract only scientists is ridiculous. High School needs specialists in all fields, not Education Majors who can pretend to teach any course. (And on this, my hard science brethren will back me up: we've all seen what education majors can do at universities, and it sure as hell ain't learn a subject well enough to teach it.)
And, to respond to your statement, I, as a guy with a ton of history degrees, find the High School education system stacked against me. I am less qualified than someone with an education degree who got a C- in my course at the university. Heck, I am less qualified than an Athletics major who can be the Assistant Coach of the football team. Yet, because I have a demonstrated set of critical skills, I am more capable of finding a decent-paying job outside of education than Coach or an education major.
And, just to take the Adobe case: it's not only Adobe that does this, just that they're the worst offender. Windows media player, to give another example, does the same thing. Windows itself facilitates it by allowing/requiring an application to halt and kick up a focus-changing system prompt which is not selectable through switching tasks. When I switch tasks, I use the OS, not the software. When I switch to an application that has halting everything while awaiting input, I may as well see that input box when I switch to the task, no?
The response "Learn your software" is completely out of place: you can only "learn" stuff that follows a set of principles, from which you can predict behavior. Windows has been hashed by so many committees working on the completely erroneous design philosophy that "the interface should hide what the computer is actually doing", and "An interface that 'gets it right' 80% of the time is intuitive". The first rule means you can never learn how to run software from the interface. (Classic example of this is the original Macintosh "desktop", which was a space that existed on all storage devices. Screw up on a one-drive Mac, and you got the dreaded "insert disk A"/"insert disk B" endless loop) The second rule means it will never work. A 20% per-operation failure rate (hell, even a 2% one) spread across a complex, multitasking environment means that your odds of doing anything efficiently are 50/50. I mean, okay, it might work for writing business letters, btu for anything more complicated than that, the features that are designed to "help" start getting in the way.
Finally, I didn't say Linux was better. In fact, it's probably just as bad or worse. My point was: issues with OS functionality do not boil down to gross ignorance. In my case, it's the OS (and, sure the applications written for the OS) creating friction that impedes my efficiency. Of course, I'm probably ruined from having used Amiga OS for 6 years, which was (at its time), the one, true, OS.
Hey man, I have issues with XP and Vista, and it's not through lack of very basic knowledge. It's because the damn thing puts on airs. Better than. It pretends to know better than I what I want to do. I cut and paste in a document, and it puts an icon directly over the text I'm trying to edit, and doesn't give me instructions on how to change it. I click on a document on the web -- while I have 10 browser windows open, 4 Word files, a specialized text editor, a media player, and a graphics editor running -- and it decides it's a PDF, so it kicks up Adobe. Adobe kicks up, decides it needs an update, and decides the best way to get it is to change the focus. So it halts the whole damn browser, and puts a mandatory "Yes/No" dialog box underneath all the windows on the desktop, and which doesn't appear on the task par, and all for an update I can't run, because it requires installing files that are on part of the network I don't have access to.
Then I have issues with the programs that change the focus correctly, so they alert me to a non issue. Hey, I'm trying to work here! Maybe I should find out who gave the OS the right to bother me, and call them up every time I curse at the computer.
I've got issues with the registry hive being one giant memory leak. Why do does the PC need to remember every single configuration of my wireless cards, especially the ones I never got to work?
I've got issues with the computer deciding to allow programs to run at startup without asking me, then yelling at me when I disable them.
I've got issues with Word deciding, on the basis of properties I don't have access to, what language a document is written in, even after I turn off auto-detection, (because I'm the funking philologist here, not this bucket of bolts that thinks Portuguese was at some point the language of the University of Paris), and then applies auto-correction schemes in the clearly wrong language. Don't like it? No problem. Just dig out your install disk with support for the language we're auto-correcting in, and you'll be able to disable it. What? You bought an English version?
So, yes, I've got 'issues' with XP or Vista, and with the way many programs use the OS to lord it over me. I am the God, not the computer: and if you believe differently, then that is the basic knowledge you lack. The computer is not some capricious Zeus, firing thunderbolts at My Documents and siring children with my wife.
light meter (I assume by "environmental sensors" you mean temperature/pressure/altitude/compass).
But, since your project is vaporware, let's consider a sensor package that will genuinely help your "away team" in the most hazardous environments to boost their mission completion rate. That, or to get laid. Same difference
A) Hydrometer (alcoholometer). B) Particulate counter capable of determining both Cigarette Smoke Density and presence/absence of Cannabis. C) Pheremone analyzer to determine presence and disposition of available members of either sex. D) Audio analyzer/shock device to enable a Trekkie basement-troglodyte to be able to dance. E) Breathalyzer/Bartenders Guide. F) Beer-goggle error-avoidance system. G) ConversATron device that emits a high-pitched whine whenever operator utters a TLA (such as TOS, TNG, DS9(I guess that's a TANA)).
So let me guess this right, this guy is not a certified engineer of any sort. No problem with that: as an academic, his professional work is subject to academic standards, peer review, and published methodology. You'd only need certification if the guy's work was not open to scrutiny.
Oh wait, you mean this work has neither academic authority or professional credentials? And he still failed to find evidence of anything on the hard drive?
After all, the academic world is full of crackpots. I remember being present when an esteemed member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a distinguished physicist gave a lecture at a scientific institute in Paris, featuring a number of important scientists (including the once-and-future education minister). Instead of a talk on physics, he decided on history: some 300-odd years of human history had been duplicated. That is, the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire are actually the same time! Come to think of it, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament refer to the same period. It got worse.
But even that crackpot cited his source: some prisoner of the Czarists who wrote in prison at the end of the Nineteenth Century. He was practically laughed out of the room (except for the Minister of Education, who shouted him out). So this guy's expert testimony is less credible than a post-Cold War nutjob.
That's right. They don't cut it. Deep Throat wasn't just an anonymous source, he was a high-level source within the administration, who, while choosing to remain anonymous (until recently), provided Woodward with hard evidence to back up the claims.
Er, "news" and "journalism" do not involve "rumor". Rumor can lead you to something, but if you are going to publish a "high ranking source" article, you better be sure that source is high ranking, and that your information is reliable. Otherwise, it is, as Kotaku stated, "a rumor". An "anonymous source" does not cut it: that could be my grandmother. Spreading rumors is neither journalism nor publishing news.
Okay, so here's probably what happens: someone leaks something to Kotaku. Who's leaking it? We don't know; nor do we know why. But they think it's pretty good stuff. So Kotaku pursues the story with their contacts at Sony. Here's the problems: 1. How many new services or products have been announced as "confirmation" of an apparently "off-the-record" story? 2. In their correspondence with their "official sources", was any information about the "rumor" confirmed or denied? If the official source says, "yes, but please keep quiet about it", well, then you've got a worthless source and a privileged one, and -- even if you attribute everything to the "worthless" source --, your decision to publish could have been and probably was motivated by the confirmation through the privileged source. And that's how your privileged source is going to view it. 3. How did Kotaku establish contacts with the "leak"? From the Sony PR perspective, the answer is going to be, "most likely through the access we gave them to our company".
I have no love for Sony here, but Kotaku's argument for a "journalistic ethical stance" is pretty thin. They weren't "just doing their job".
But I guess the competition among game blogs is fierce, as it is for the consoles they write about.
Yeah, sure, I know what inflation is. I also know that there were a hell of a lot fewer Apple II owners in 1980 then there are current Macintosh owners. My point wasn't that inflation doesn't exist, but rather that CE categories do not historically follow inflation. Price matters psychologically to the buyer: this is the plane on which things are sold: again, take the PS3. In 1980 dollars, its price is competitive with the Atari 2600 console. But, psychologically (and this is where you sell things, as opposed to "hey, in 1980 dollars"), it's damn expensive. The same for the iPhone.
And Psychology matters for the target market. Sure, there are plenty of $500 smartphones out there, and people buy them. But why do people buy them? I'd argue most of those smartphones are bought by tech geeks/other high-paid people who need an expensive reminder that their ass belongs to someone else. Who's gonna buy the iPhone? Last week, I was at a concert (incidentally by a band that, as Apple's ads tell me, has an exclusive EP available at iTMS) and overheard some folks talking about their iPods. The iPhone came up: "hey, you hear they're gonna be making a phone?", "Yeah, but it's gonna be so expensive -- no way I can afford that."
The street buzz is against it. And it's only gonna get worse, but not due to the technical merits (or problems) -- about which we will see. The big problem now is Steve Jobs. No, I'm not opposed to what he's trying to do with the iPhone. Quite the contrary, I applaud his being a disruptive force in an inbred oligarchic market that is limiting the utility of the utility they sell out of pure greed. But that's the problem: building the iPhone, branding it as Apple, and making it clear it's their hardware, and not the networks', demanding complete control over the software onboard (and disabling 3G for exactly that reason), and avoiding any sort of "network subscription discount" -- all these are great moves to revolutionize an oligarchy that, especially in the US, nickels and dimes the consumer, then spends their time trying to figure out why consumers aren't flocking to their high-cost, low-value services. And in targeting these sacred cows of the cellular industry -- reminding providers they are 'orifices', not vertically integrated titans --, Mr. Jobs has made sure that he'll literally scare up the full hostility of all competing providers. By the time the iPhone comes out, look for extremely aggressive posturing by everyone but Cingular: they are going to try to sink this thing.
Pricing: it's not just absolute prices; it's relative prices. The iPhone is damn expensive however you cut it: and while inflation may be a factor, in electronics the "latest generation" seems to come in at about the same price tag: A top-of-the-line personal computer in 1980 would cost you about $2000, and you'd pay about $2000 today.
Functionality: what evidence do you have that any of this will work? about as much as that it won't work. Evidence it will work: well, Apple's initial iPod had an interface that was simple, intuitive, and functional. Evidence it won't work: the Newton had some cool interface ideas that just didn't work.
And practically every Apple product released has some hardware issues in the first generation: that's the price you pay for being "cutting edge", I suppose.
But I suppose you're right, the iPhone is like the Newton about as much as it is like the iPod.
Bringing up the PS3 is quite interesting. If a quarter of one percent of console owners said they'd plunk down the $600 for a PS3 before the product was even released then Sony would be in even worse trouble than they are now. Yeah, alright, but your point is that Apple is targeting the top 1% of the market. Well, again, a couple things: the "top 1%" is the percentage that is price-insensitive. They'll buy it at whatever cost. Also, the respondents are going purely on buzz: the only downside they've heard is the price. The "switch to Cingular for a two-year plan" is going to be a dealbreaker for many consumers. Now the real price gets up in the Newton range! And while you can argue that all mobile providers are the same, consumers have an inherent resistance against changing products: better an old demon than a new god, the sayings go. So that "1% of a quarter of the market" can only go down, not up.
Like the Newton, the real test is going to be how good the interface is. The iPod only really needed a screen and a clickwheel: finger-and-eyeball interface. This thing adds the whole face into the mix.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye, and if those guys looked at their metrics, they'd see the number of people doing precisely that was increasing. When I get my friends to use Firefox, it is an "IE-Killer app." for two reasons: A) you can run Flash sites without the ActiveX warning coming up, and you can do so without enabling ActiveX controls. B) Adblock. If an ad provider decides "it's cool" to spray their ad across the content in a manner that interrupts my browsing, I will kill it. If it flashes and sparks and triggers a gran mal seizure, I will kill it. If it shills "free (spyware-enhanced)" smileys, I will kill it. Funny, I haven't blocked Google Ads yet, or most of the ad providers. But those that screw with me? Hell yeah! And if that hurts their bottom line, horror! They might have to adopt more civil advertising techniques!
So no, Adblock doesn't automatically block all ads: it empowers us to set the rules for fair web use.
It's not a tough interface design problem.
Heck, you can probably make an 80/20 rule for it:
1) 80% of the time, users are interacting on 20% of the function.
Come to think of it, it's simpler than that:
2) 80% of the time, users want one of four functions. Oh yeah, and might as well throw in
3) with a button interface, users can "spatially remember" three distinct buttons without looking (or training).
and
4) with a dial, that "spatial memory" becomes 5 discrete positions, and a whole mess of sweet intension/remission levels (=volume, tuning have much higher response times).
So design-wise, you want 5 dials maximum. Of those dials, four are fixed in function, and one changes the paradigm (and presumably some of the other dials' function). The main things anyone would want to do are there, and they're there at the first level.
If you wanted to have a similar arrangement with keys, you'd need between 10 and 25 keys. It would not make sense.
Dude, you'd need to exit the DOS game and do that trick. Much better to have two bases with twice the living quarters as what you need. At the end of the month, transfer your entire R&D staff from one to the other. Engineers/Scientists in transit don't get their salaries paid.
And you thought business travel was a bitch in your field.
Yeah, fancy that. Submit substantially the same paper to an anti-plagiarism site and the second time it comes back as plagiarized.
Well, DeVry degrees are generally a joke and target of pity.
Heck, heavily advertised degree programs come in two sorts: Diploma Mills, which make their money by selling degrees with no value, and Turnover Engines, which make their money by enrolling people who subsequently drop out due to real life constraints, dissonance (it was harder than I expected) or disillusionment (I'm paying for what?).
A degree in video games is ideal for a Turnover Engine school: people think, "hey I like games, maybe I should work on them." They go to a course taught by an underpaid CS MA, and drop out: either they realize there's stuff like math and work involved and bail, or they engage the subject and realize that the degree is gonna be worthless.
However, there are some "serious" game schools, whose employees do get jobs in the industry. Read what people say about DigiPen, or, for example, the guy above me responding to this thread went to Full Sail. He also seems to like GuildHall. Look at where the graduates go, and how many of them. Also note what the students do while there: what courses are they taking?
There should be a difference between CS and Computer Game Design. A proper Computer Game Design course should apply CS theory to the fundamentally creative and collaborative endeavor of making games. So students should come out with a portfolio that demonstrates their capabilities individually and as members of teams. Again, go to those websites and download some student projects.
Blog article links to another, dated February 2007 on how to hack a WEP network. Gee, 2 years ago Tomshardware had a tutorial, and by then it was already old news. ForceFieldWireless (among others) has had a "wifi paint" product on the market for years.
Not too useful for many people, I suppose. I mean, a properly secured wireless network with a sensible admin should be able to monitor break ins. For stuff you want to restrict on site, Cat-5 (or -6) works pretty well, and there's much less RF crap to shield.
Nah, it's just the same writing staff as for Leonard Nimoy in in search of: "Scholars think..."
Alright, I cut out a long, rambling philosophical discussion of the subject, explaining with charts and graphs why you're wrong. Instead, I'll cut to the chase. Think of it this way: if you turned slashdot karma back into a numeric value, and then gave the top 200 karma-laden users jobs as professional posters to news aggregators in general, those users would continue to whore slashdot, ignore the other sites, and establish a hierarchy based on the number of +5 slashdot posts, irrespective of their content.
Well, okay, so it wouldn't be much different. But if you told those guys, "hey, y'all don't need to subscribe to slashdot, why don't you go screw around with digg for a while," they would come back with, "we ain't paid to post on digg". Same here. We love to discuss ideas, and we do put stuff up on free sites hosted by universities. But we ain't paid for that. And the fact there's pressure to publish in the big journals, both in terms of jobs/research monies, and in terms of getting others to pay attention to ideas makes those publications more valuable. Heck, the fact that many institutions have stated recruitment/tenure/granting policies that require/count publications in certain journals makes those journals obligatory for the libraries of those institutions. And at that point, a publisher can start fleecing.
Patents, shmatents, I'm talking about the RIAA trying to sue off the market any attempt at a personal media player.
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break!
How many analysts out there saw the Zunes Microsoft unveiled last fall and actually predicted a success? I'm sorry, I call BS, along with the claim that the iPod created the market for HD-based players. HD-players existed long before the iPod, and anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition.
I'm not saying the iPod didn't create a huge demand, and grab a large part of the exploding market, but let's not exaggerate things here.
Put another way, do we really need a pro-mac blog to provide a multi-part essay on why the Zune is not a success? I mean, this thing is as much a dog as the Apple ROKR!
Hey, the article only mentioned Full Sail and Guildhall. It didn't say nothin' about DigiPen.
While you can say, "DigiPen's been around for twenty years", or something like that, the same doesn't hold true for most games programs out there. For many schools around the country, having a "games program" is seen as a recruiting tool, and a way to bolster flagging CS enrollment ('cos no department likes to lose students). The same youthful lack of experience that makes 18-year-olds volunteer for the infantry drives a lot of these computer games programs: and the for-lots-of-profit ITT-class of $kool$ has started to take notice. These guys have lots of churn, and make their money by underpaying marginally qualified personnel to teach a textbook to students who are most likely to drop out after paying their tuition (when they realize there's real work involved).
Because with Windows, most of the time, that game will work. With all that pre-installed crap, it'll probably work badly, but it should run. Or, if it doesn't run, the Support people can drag the sucker out and frustrate 'em to the point where the user blames something else.
With a Linux install, that's a very quick (and angry) phone call.
Yes, the assumption that "any PC" is a "windows PC" is a big problem, and at the same time, it is a bit of a red herring: the assumption has no historical basis (15 years ago, a PC was not necessarily a windows box), and if you go in, determined that people believe that way, you're never going to change beliefs (and market share).
But, heck, what exactly lies behind this Linux drive? Most Linux users would have no problem assembling their PCs from scratch (and for less money) -- all the parts are top-notch, and those with any technical knowledge tend to view "support" as hassle you go through to get an RMA. I'm sure folks at Dell are asking themselves: "The Linux $***storm, does it represent real customers, or is it an ideologial crusade by a vocal minority, who wouldn't buy our stuff anyway?"
Well?
Okay, here's what I'd like to see: the option to buy a system that works with some decent version Linux, with everything I needed to run it, in the box. I don't need front-page real-estate, and I don't need bickering over particular installs.
Would I buy it? Probably not. If I'm gonna set up a PC to run Linux permanently, I'll follow the time-honored way of doing it: take some old PC parts I have lying around the house, put them together, curse and swear over the non-existent or crappy drivers, and have some frankenstein computer around the house.
Parent, and ABG below. It's true for just about every undergraduate field.
Undergraduate education has a few factors that drive the curriculum: one is enrollment (make it too hard, and nobody shows up; require everybody to take it, and everybody has to pass it), another is vocational preparation (what does the job market demand? or -- mixing enrollment and vocation -- what do the students think the job market demands?). The folks doing the teaching aren't really interested in either of these, and nor are the "good students".
The "vocational" side of university education has always been there, and it's always been looked down upon by the really sharp people. And, you know what? In spite of the political rhetoric you hear around the US and Europe, the students who "Hit it out of the park" career-wise, the big successes, the Googles, Netscapes, Yahoos, Nokias and so on, aren't the ones who stick to a vocational curriculum. The ones who just did what the course told them to do are the guys who end up seeing their Technical Support jobs get outsourced.
The "enrollment" issue is even more pernicious. No department wants to lose students -- since students are tied to money and power in the universities. So if a subject gets "less popular", the curriculum gets "easier" to boost retention.
University courses, like other forms of professional formation, do teach a major professional skill: that to achieve results you need to be willing to do lots of crap-work, and that a good job involves doing boring stuff much of the time.
Outside of that, the true strength of universities is that you're given some good resources to play with, and are surrounded by smart, curious, interested people. Find your passion, pursue it, and don't sweat money or jobs. Any employer you'd want to work for will recognize your abilities.
Actually, your argument proves my point. If all you need to be successful in a HS history course is the ability to regurgitate what's in the textbook, that is because you had a crappy history teacher. Your HS experience sounds just like mine: decent math and science instruction and crappy humanities.
It's always about critical thinking. The logic, "well, the way we teach it in HS, it doesn't involve critical thinking; moreover, it doesn't get you a job; therefore it's unimportant." Is thus wrong on both counts: the first argument is the same as "well, in HS Biology the teachers teach Intelligent Design, which is completely without scientific merit. Therefore, there's no need to bring in real scientists to teach biology/" The "no money" argument begs the question: us the purpose of public education to help people get rich? Heck, public education isn't even vocational training: most of the jobs people do for life -- even those with science-oriented college degrees -- are learned in a matter of months. But to function as a member of society, and to have the apparatus to enjoy fully human existence, these are things that require a broad range of human skills.
Besides, we've all seen what happens when we let ourselves be ruled by people who think their plans will work even if they ignore science and history.
okay, fine. I have a Ph.D. in history. No, I didn't do it for the money.
But, you know what? Even a HS teacher with a BA in History is a rare thing. Hell, I went to a public HS (in the same county where public schools sought subsidies because the majority of their students spoke "Ebonics"), Math and Sciences were taught by Ph.D.s. History? That was taught by a guy known as "coach." English? We found ourselves being taught by a series of spent pieces of used jet trash who got pinned sophomore year at the sorority, engaged junior year, married at graduation, and divorced two years later. They hated students and they hated the education degree that made them deal with them.
Come to think of it, Coach deemed me unsuitable for AP History, and the sorority hags didn't want me anywhere near their honors courses. The only straight As I got were in Math and the Sciences, particularly the computer courses. So now I publish more in a year than my English teachers actually read, and I get paid to be a historian, whereas Coach didn't think I could hack Advanced Placement, and the only part of my HS education I use on a daily basis consists in foreign language education.
Now, ask yourself: how much math beyond algebra do most HS students need? Likewise for physics. Critical thinking skills are taught in history classes; effective communication in English. Foreign language courses are in themselves valuable.
You can put a dollar value on all these things, and if you did, you'd probably find out that, per student hour in the classroom, "soft skills" make more of a difference than the hard sciences.
So why should we favor math and the hard sciences? By all means, I'm for strengthening our HS system, but to pretend that we need to spend more money to attract only scientists is ridiculous. High School needs specialists in all fields, not Education Majors who can pretend to teach any course. (And on this, my hard science brethren will back me up: we've all seen what education majors can do at universities, and it sure as hell ain't learn a subject well enough to teach it.)
And, to respond to your statement, I, as a guy with a ton of history degrees, find the High School education system stacked against me. I am less qualified than someone with an education degree who got a C- in my course at the university. Heck, I am less qualified than an Athletics major who can be the Assistant Coach of the football team. Yet, because I have a demonstrated set of critical skills, I am more capable of finding a decent-paying job outside of education than Coach or an education major.
Well, I'm glad you found them hilarious.
And, just to take the Adobe case: it's not only Adobe that does this, just that they're the worst offender. Windows media player, to give another example, does the same thing. Windows itself facilitates it by allowing/requiring an application to halt and kick up a focus-changing system prompt which is not selectable through switching tasks. When I switch tasks, I use the OS, not the software. When I switch to an application that has halting everything while awaiting input, I may as well see that input box when I switch to the task, no?
The response "Learn your software" is completely out of place: you can only "learn" stuff that follows a set of principles, from which you can predict behavior. Windows has been hashed by so many committees working on the completely erroneous design philosophy that "the interface should hide what the computer is actually doing", and "An interface that 'gets it right' 80% of the time is intuitive". The first rule means you can never learn how to run software from the interface. (Classic example of this is the original Macintosh "desktop", which was a space that existed on all storage devices. Screw up on a one-drive Mac, and you got the dreaded "insert disk A"/"insert disk B" endless loop) The second rule means it will never work. A 20% per-operation failure rate (hell, even a 2% one) spread across a complex, multitasking environment means that your odds of doing anything efficiently are 50/50. I mean, okay, it might work for writing business letters, btu for anything more complicated than that, the features that are designed to "help" start getting in the way.
Finally, I didn't say Linux was better. In fact, it's probably just as bad or worse. My point was: issues with OS functionality do not boil down to gross ignorance. In my case, it's the OS (and, sure the applications written for the OS) creating friction that impedes my efficiency. Of course, I'm probably ruined from having used Amiga OS for 6 years, which was (at its time), the one, true, OS.
Hey man, I have issues with XP and Vista, and it's not through lack of very basic knowledge. It's because the damn thing puts on airs. Better than. It pretends to know better than I what I want to do. I cut and paste in a document, and it puts an icon directly over the text I'm trying to edit, and doesn't give me instructions on how to change it. I click on a document on the web -- while I have 10 browser windows open, 4 Word files, a specialized text editor, a media player, and a graphics editor running -- and it decides it's a PDF, so it kicks up Adobe. Adobe kicks up, decides it needs an update, and decides the best way to get it is to change the focus. So it halts the whole damn browser, and puts a mandatory "Yes/No" dialog box underneath all the windows on the desktop, and which doesn't appear on the task par, and all for an update I can't run, because it requires installing files that are on part of the network I don't have access to.
Then I have issues with the programs that change the focus correctly, so they alert me to a non issue. Hey, I'm trying to work here! Maybe I should find out who gave the OS the right to bother me, and call them up every time I curse at the computer.
I've got issues with the registry hive being one giant memory leak. Why do does the PC need to remember every single configuration of my wireless cards, especially the ones I never got to work?
I've got issues with the computer deciding to allow programs to run at startup without asking me, then yelling at me when I disable them.
I've got issues with Word deciding, on the basis of properties I don't have access to, what language a document is written in, even after I turn off auto-detection, (because I'm the funking philologist here, not this bucket of bolts that thinks Portuguese was at some point the language of the University of Paris), and then applies auto-correction schemes in the clearly wrong language. Don't like it? No problem. Just dig out your install disk with support for the language we're auto-correcting in, and you'll be able to disable it. What? You bought an English version?
So, yes, I've got 'issues' with XP or Vista, and with the way many programs use the OS to lord it over me. I am the God, not the computer: and if you believe differently, then that is the basic knowledge you lack. The computer is not some capricious Zeus, firing thunderbolts at My Documents and siring children with my wife.
light meter (I assume by "environmental sensors" you mean temperature/pressure/altitude/compass).
But, since your project is vaporware, let's consider a sensor package that will genuinely help your "away team" in the most hazardous environments to boost their mission completion rate. That, or to get laid. Same difference
A) Hydrometer (alcoholometer).
B) Particulate counter capable of determining both Cigarette Smoke Density and presence/absence of Cannabis.
C) Pheremone analyzer to determine presence and disposition of available members of either sex.
D) Audio analyzer/shock device to enable a Trekkie basement-troglodyte to be able to dance.
E) Breathalyzer/Bartenders Guide.
F) Beer-goggle error-avoidance system.
G) ConversATron device that emits a high-pitched whine whenever operator utters a TLA (such as TOS, TNG, DS9(I guess that's a TANA)).
Yeah, you were.
The diehard Amiga fans were thinking, "This would really work well if the bus ran faster than any of the cores."
So let me guess this right, this guy is not a certified engineer of any sort. No problem with that: as an academic, his professional work is subject to academic standards, peer review, and published methodology. You'd only need certification if the guy's work was not open to scrutiny.
Oh wait, you mean this work has neither academic authority or professional credentials? And he still failed to find evidence of anything on the hard drive?
After all, the academic world is full of crackpots. I remember being present when an esteemed member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a distinguished physicist gave a lecture at a scientific institute in Paris, featuring a number of important scientists (including the once-and-future education minister). Instead of a talk on physics, he decided on history: some 300-odd years of human history had been duplicated. That is, the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire are actually the same time! Come to think of it, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament refer to the same period. It got worse.
But even that crackpot cited his source: some prisoner of the Czarists who wrote in prison at the end of the Nineteenth Century. He was practically laughed out of the room (except for the Minister of Education, who shouted him out). So this guy's expert testimony is less credible than a post-Cold War nutjob.
That's right. They don't cut it. Deep Throat wasn't just an anonymous source, he was a high-level source within the administration, who, while choosing to remain anonymous (until recently), provided Woodward with hard evidence to back up the claims.
Otherwise, Deep Throat coulda been Parker Posey.
Er, "news" and "journalism" do not involve "rumor". Rumor can lead you to something, but if you are going to publish a "high ranking source" article, you better be sure that source is high ranking, and that your information is reliable. Otherwise, it is, as Kotaku stated, "a rumor". An "anonymous source" does not cut it: that could be my grandmother. Spreading rumors is neither journalism nor publishing news.
Okay, so here's probably what happens: someone leaks something to Kotaku. Who's leaking it? We don't know; nor do we know why. But they think it's pretty good stuff. So Kotaku pursues the story with their contacts at Sony. Here's the problems:
1. How many new services or products have been announced as "confirmation" of an apparently "off-the-record" story?
2. In their correspondence with their "official sources", was any information about the "rumor" confirmed or denied? If the official source says, "yes, but please keep quiet about it", well, then you've got a worthless source and a privileged one, and -- even if you attribute everything to the "worthless" source --, your decision to publish could have been and probably was motivated by the confirmation through the privileged source. And that's how your privileged source is going to view it.
3. How did Kotaku establish contacts with the "leak"? From the Sony PR perspective, the answer is going to be, "most likely through the access we gave them to our company".
I have no love for Sony here, but Kotaku's argument for a "journalistic ethical stance" is pretty thin. They weren't "just doing their job".
But I guess the competition among game blogs is fierce, as it is for the consoles they write about.
Yeah, sure, I know what inflation is. I also know that there were a hell of a lot fewer Apple II owners in 1980 then there are current Macintosh owners. My point wasn't that inflation doesn't exist, but rather that CE categories do not historically follow inflation. Price matters psychologically to the buyer: this is the plane on which things are sold: again, take the PS3. In 1980 dollars, its price is competitive with the Atari 2600 console. But, psychologically (and this is where you sell things, as opposed to "hey, in 1980 dollars"), it's damn expensive. The same for the iPhone.
And Psychology matters for the target market. Sure, there are plenty of $500 smartphones out there, and people buy them. But why do people buy them? I'd argue most of those smartphones are bought by tech geeks/other high-paid people who need an expensive reminder that their ass belongs to someone else. Who's gonna buy the iPhone? Last week, I was at a concert (incidentally by a band that, as Apple's ads tell me, has an exclusive EP available at iTMS) and overheard some folks talking about their iPods. The iPhone came up: "hey, you hear they're gonna be making a phone?", "Yeah, but it's gonna be so expensive -- no way I can afford that."
The street buzz is against it. And it's only gonna get worse, but not due to the technical merits (or problems) -- about which we will see. The big problem now is Steve Jobs. No, I'm not opposed to what he's trying to do with the iPhone. Quite the contrary, I applaud his being a disruptive force in an inbred oligarchic market that is limiting the utility of the utility they sell out of pure greed. But that's the problem: building the iPhone, branding it as Apple, and making it clear it's their hardware, and not the networks', demanding complete control over the software onboard (and disabling 3G for exactly that reason), and avoiding any sort of "network subscription discount" -- all these are great moves to revolutionize an oligarchy that, especially in the US, nickels and dimes the consumer, then spends their time trying to figure out why consumers aren't flocking to their high-cost, low-value services. And in targeting these sacred cows of the cellular industry -- reminding providers they are 'orifices', not vertically integrated titans --, Mr. Jobs has made sure that he'll literally scare up the full hostility of all competing providers. By the time the iPhone comes out, look for extremely aggressive posturing by everyone but Cingular: they are going to try to sink this thing.
Pricing: it's not just absolute prices; it's relative prices. The iPhone is damn expensive however you cut it: and while inflation may be a factor, in electronics the "latest generation" seems to come in at about the same price tag: A top-of-the-line personal computer in 1980 would cost you about $2000, and you'd pay about $2000 today.
Functionality: what evidence do you have that any of this will work? about as much as that it won't work. Evidence it will work: well, Apple's initial iPod had an interface that was simple, intuitive, and functional. Evidence it won't work: the Newton had some cool interface ideas that just didn't work.
And practically every Apple product released has some hardware issues in the first generation: that's the price you pay for being "cutting edge", I suppose.
But I suppose you're right, the iPhone is like the Newton about as much as it is like the iPod.
Bringing up the PS3 is quite interesting. If a quarter of one percent of console owners said they'd plunk down the $600 for a PS3 before the product was even released then Sony would be in even worse trouble than they are now.
Yeah, alright, but your point is that Apple is targeting the top 1% of the market. Well, again, a couple things: the "top 1%" is the percentage that is price-insensitive. They'll buy it at whatever cost. Also, the respondents are going purely on buzz: the only downside they've heard is the price. The "switch to Cingular for a two-year plan" is going to be a dealbreaker for many consumers. Now the real price gets up in the Newton range! And while you can argue that all mobile providers are the same, consumers have an inherent resistance against changing products: better an old demon than a new god, the sayings go. So that "1% of a quarter of the market" can only go down, not up.
Like the Newton, the real test is going to be how good the interface is. The iPod only really needed a screen and a clickwheel: finger-and-eyeball interface. This thing adds the whole face into the mix.