I was walking down a street and saw a bunch of time warner emblems in red paint marking the doors of file sharers, before the bombs came.
I didn't know the american campaign fund, I mean warmachine, was running out of us funded arabs to fight:(.
Keep your eye on the fruit.
Learning how things work is one thing, and you'll learn how the relevant things work on the job.
The real difference between school and the work day is people and process. When you're working for a company you have to deal with the tools that they use, the process (or lack thereof) that is in place, and the management structure that you will be forced to deal with day to day. These things make the difference from job to job and company to company. So being informed about how good companies run and what sorts of tools they use to do their jobs is useful. Often schools lack exposure to multiple development environments, revision and problem tracking solutions, and of course dealing with the business and sales forces that are often directly opposed to your opinions. This information might help you choose a good job over a poor one and, make no mistake, there is a difference.
These days I think (as others have mentioned) that taking advantage of the wealth of open source projects out there is an excellent resource. Find one that is commercial level, not just a bunch of kids who want to do something cool. Something run by experienced professionals (who MIGHT be kids, it happens). Sign up and start taking on tasks and seeing how they actually keep the ship running. Get used to co-developing and merging code, documenting it for others to read, and testing in a different way than you might have on small projects in school. Keep in mind that each thing you check in ought to be as close to production quality as possible, and see how a large project can take a list of gazillions of problems and continue to chug away and produce releases. Learn how good projects are architected with growth in mind, but with concern for getting step 1 out the door before getting mired in step 2. The details fill themselves in, just get used to the environment.
Oh, and more importantly, do this on a very part time level while working a junior position that pads your resumé(or while unemployed/at school). The rest of the time, go out and socialize and enjoy other hobbies. Don't burn out, and don't turn into a closet case, because nobody wants to work with uninteresting or antisocial people. I would always hire somebody smart but enjoyable who would go out for a beer with the team or help keep things friendly and loose at work over somebody who is much smarter but absolutely no fun to be around. There are places that hire purely on scores and grand ideas, but most business is a social endeavor. At any given job not everybody has to be a wizard (and somebody fresh out of school is not hired for their all-encompassing knowledge), in fact with too many chiefs nothing will ever get done and a business will tank. So you have plenty of time to learn while you work your way up, and lots of people to learn from.
I see a lot of people giving you flack for coming out of school without a lot of knowledge. Well frankly most schools are not good for learning how everything works. There is too much out there for them to focus on how a NES emulator works. They are busy with fundamentals, with teaching you to work hard, and seeing if you can absorb and learn. Thats all a degree means. It means you can handle whats thrown at you, not that you already know how to do it.
I'd give it some time to gain momentum, if most users are like me, they've hacked the shit out of the windows registry or moved that little 'reboot now, screw the powerpoint presentation you are in the middle of' box somewhere off-screen. It may simply take people a long time to bother rebooting again or to notice the update, depending on their auto-update settings.
A lot of great content providers host their own data so that they can milk the advertising potential of it. Once it gets out on youtube it is out of their hands. Now Google is certainly dominant in the ad market, so in reality they would have been paying money out to the people who didn't want their data on google-video (now youtube). This is a very clever way to change the model with which money changes hands (same bottom line for google?) and yet place the content in their portal (in this case youtube). Seems like common sense to me!
Perhaps a wealth sharing venture with a database as popular as youtube will wind up having a profound impact on the web-enabled income models and ad-sense type programs of today. Take the advertising burden back off of the individual, reduce overal complexity and maintanence costs of rolling out these models by saying 'listen, just put it on youtube and you still get paid'. Will popular web sites bite and give up their golden eggs?
This would certainly serve to reduce WWW bloat and overhead, but also puts all the cards in fewer hands (aka the conventional media tycoons of today).
Neil Stephenson's Library of Congress?
Really good, or really bad?
Tough call!
My gut instinct is to say 'no, its not worth it'. Many high tech companies have career ladders that eventually promote the most senior technical people into the management stream so as to give them a path to increased salaries. I have seen it several times. The preferred choice really is to start your own company or work on something in your spare time (make sure your NDA allows room!) that may give you a chance at success. Being a wage-slave never will. A family man may differ as the stabili.. oh whats that? Laid off you say? Shit.
These issues are by-design unfortunately. I'm not sure if its the only way for these games to make profit, but rather than make them fun and short lived PvE-wise
Normal Games
Do a dungeon, get the loot
WoW
do the dungeon, and 0.003% of the time, you get the loot
This is also seen in the levelling and challenge-completion aspects of the game
Normal games:
defeat X and advance to the next level!
WoW
defeat 4000 X's and advance your faction to the next level!
defeat 4000 more X's and advance to the next level!
buy a bot and have it do this for you while you do something else... seriously
It is, in my mind, a horribly broken gaming methodology. Money per addict-wise its great, but in an ADD-ridden society that is looking for entertainment value I think that these gaming giants are going to die out soon and be regarded as a blunder and definitely a black mark on the gaming market in the near future. I'm surprised they've lasted this long without any effort towards reducing the repetition and monotony their games provide, are people honestly that bored/addicted?
A giant portion (in the 90% range, 99% maybe??) of these games misses the point that utilization of the other human controlled players provides a dynamic experience. Instead they group a bunch of these players together so they can chat mindlessly while encountering 1000's of instances of the same static challenge.
I suppose cigarettes and cola outsell caviar too, lowest common demoninators - the essence of America.
Apple keeping control of hardware allows them to maintain a quality product and a competetive edge. Once they release that to the 'least common denominator' generic PC manufacturers they not only have a harder time guaranteeing a quality experience to end customers, but they have to shoulder the burden of support and compatibility that currently not having to deal with allows them to flourish.
It was a big deal for them to make a leap to intel because of the 'keep up with the latest' burden that is undoubtably taxing them right now, but it was a careful and strategic move on their part that is paying off. But throwing their OS on everything including the kitchen sink, dealing with support, adding 400 million drivers instead of 10 and keeping all of those maintained or hoping vendors do (but again not having guarantees) is something that is a HUGE burden and can sink companies. Only microsoft has ever really pulled it off and it took them a monopoly and somewhat forced compliance to do so.
Linuxes and such out there are getting far more widespread in terms of compatibility but again that is a burden shouldered by individual vendors and 'nix contributors. If Jobs wants to guarantee that your apple will run slick as shit, he can't really afford to pass that particular buck.
I'd just like to publicly thank nintendo for hopefully putting an end to the drama and politics surrounding the 'need some perspective' video game culture that is going off the deepend.
Oh look a video game, pew pew pew, done!
Privacy, spyware, contracts, wtf?
Is there a process for them to become established with a content license similar to that of a library? Libraries recieve book donations all the time and then index them (and provide a librarian!) so you can use your paid membership to borrow and read them. Not only are they enabling you to make copies, but they are providing you the content. How does the law work for libraries?
If all else fails could they not simply purchase a copy of each book? Then there would not be much one could say about their fair use of the content that they own, since they are not redistributing it. People make profit from content they have purchased all the time, without reselling the content itself. They don't go back to the author of the book they used as the cornerstone of their research and give him half their Pulitzer prize money.
I sure hope that the emphasis is on the content and their use of it, as opposed to what they are enabling others to do with it. I am really sick of the law getting involved in 'enabling technologies' and shutting them down, they hurt the world as a whole when they do this. Napster, torrents etc allow people to obtain illegal content. Guns allow people to put holes in other people. Shovels allow people to bury people with holes in them and get away scott free. Latex allows peopel to commit crimes without leaving finger prints. Get rid of that and prom's across America will instantly become less fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't email spam be modded up or down (with tags!) instead of just killfiled? Works for slashdot posts, the analogy is clear.
I wonder if they'd take offense to a poster that read: "My priest wrote it, my grandchildren will believe it, that settles it."
I was walking down a street and saw a bunch of time warner emblems in red paint marking the doors of file sharers, before the bombs came. I didn't know the american campaign fund, I mean warmachine, was running out of us funded arabs to fight :(.
Keep your eye on the fruit.
Learning how things work is one thing, and you'll learn how the relevant things work on the job. The real difference between school and the work day is people and process. When you're working for a company you have to deal with the tools that they use, the process (or lack thereof) that is in place, and the management structure that you will be forced to deal with day to day. These things make the difference from job to job and company to company. So being informed about how good companies run and what sorts of tools they use to do their jobs is useful. Often schools lack exposure to multiple development environments, revision and problem tracking solutions, and of course dealing with the business and sales forces that are often directly opposed to your opinions. This information might help you choose a good job over a poor one and, make no mistake, there is a difference. These days I think (as others have mentioned) that taking advantage of the wealth of open source projects out there is an excellent resource. Find one that is commercial level, not just a bunch of kids who want to do something cool. Something run by experienced professionals (who MIGHT be kids, it happens). Sign up and start taking on tasks and seeing how they actually keep the ship running. Get used to co-developing and merging code, documenting it for others to read, and testing in a different way than you might have on small projects in school. Keep in mind that each thing you check in ought to be as close to production quality as possible, and see how a large project can take a list of gazillions of problems and continue to chug away and produce releases. Learn how good projects are architected with growth in mind, but with concern for getting step 1 out the door before getting mired in step 2. The details fill themselves in, just get used to the environment. Oh, and more importantly, do this on a very part time level while working a junior position that pads your resumé(or while unemployed/at school). The rest of the time, go out and socialize and enjoy other hobbies. Don't burn out, and don't turn into a closet case, because nobody wants to work with uninteresting or antisocial people. I would always hire somebody smart but enjoyable who would go out for a beer with the team or help keep things friendly and loose at work over somebody who is much smarter but absolutely no fun to be around. There are places that hire purely on scores and grand ideas, but most business is a social endeavor. At any given job not everybody has to be a wizard (and somebody fresh out of school is not hired for their all-encompassing knowledge), in fact with too many chiefs nothing will ever get done and a business will tank. So you have plenty of time to learn while you work your way up, and lots of people to learn from. I see a lot of people giving you flack for coming out of school without a lot of knowledge. Well frankly most schools are not good for learning how everything works. There is too much out there for them to focus on how a NES emulator works. They are busy with fundamentals, with teaching you to work hard, and seeing if you can absorb and learn. Thats all a degree means. It means you can handle whats thrown at you, not that you already know how to do it.
:s/land/oil/
I'd give it some time to gain momentum, if most users are like me, they've hacked the shit out of the windows registry or moved that little 'reboot now, screw the powerpoint presentation you are in the middle of' box somewhere off-screen. It may simply take people a long time to bother rebooting again or to notice the update, depending on their auto-update settings.
A lot of great content providers host their own data so that they can milk the advertising potential of it. Once it gets out on youtube it is out of their hands. Now Google is certainly dominant in the ad market, so in reality they would have been paying money out to the people who didn't want their data on google-video (now youtube). This is a very clever way to change the model with which money changes hands (same bottom line for google?) and yet place the content in their portal (in this case youtube). Seems like common sense to me! Perhaps a wealth sharing venture with a database as popular as youtube will wind up having a profound impact on the web-enabled income models and ad-sense type programs of today. Take the advertising burden back off of the individual, reduce overal complexity and maintanence costs of rolling out these models by saying 'listen, just put it on youtube and you still get paid'. Will popular web sites bite and give up their golden eggs? This would certainly serve to reduce WWW bloat and overhead, but also puts all the cards in fewer hands (aka the conventional media tycoons of today). Neil Stephenson's Library of Congress? Really good, or really bad? Tough call!
My gut instinct is to say 'no, its not worth it'. Many high tech companies have career ladders that eventually promote the most senior technical people into the management stream so as to give them a path to increased salaries. I have seen it several times. The preferred choice really is to start your own company or work on something in your spare time (make sure your NDA allows room!) that may give you a chance at success. Being a wage-slave never will. A family man may differ as the stabili.. oh whats that? Laid off you say? Shit.
These issues are by-design unfortunately. I'm not sure if its the only way for these games to make profit, but rather than make them fun and short lived PvE-wise Normal Games Do a dungeon, get the loot WoW do the dungeon, and 0.003% of the time, you get the loot This is also seen in the levelling and challenge-completion aspects of the game Normal games: defeat X and advance to the next level! WoW defeat 4000 X's and advance your faction to the next level! defeat 4000 more X's and advance to the next level! buy a bot and have it do this for you while you do something else... seriously It is, in my mind, a horribly broken gaming methodology. Money per addict-wise its great, but in an ADD-ridden society that is looking for entertainment value I think that these gaming giants are going to die out soon and be regarded as a blunder and definitely a black mark on the gaming market in the near future. I'm surprised they've lasted this long without any effort towards reducing the repetition and monotony their games provide, are people honestly that bored/addicted? A giant portion (in the 90% range, 99% maybe??) of these games misses the point that utilization of the other human controlled players provides a dynamic experience. Instead they group a bunch of these players together so they can chat mindlessly while encountering 1000's of instances of the same static challenge. I suppose cigarettes and cola outsell caviar too, lowest common demoninators - the essence of America.
Apple keeping control of hardware allows them to maintain a quality product and a competetive edge. Once they release that to the 'least common denominator' generic PC manufacturers they not only have a harder time guaranteeing a quality experience to end customers, but they have to shoulder the burden of support and compatibility that currently not having to deal with allows them to flourish. It was a big deal for them to make a leap to intel because of the 'keep up with the latest' burden that is undoubtably taxing them right now, but it was a careful and strategic move on their part that is paying off. But throwing their OS on everything including the kitchen sink, dealing with support, adding 400 million drivers instead of 10 and keeping all of those maintained or hoping vendors do (but again not having guarantees) is something that is a HUGE burden and can sink companies. Only microsoft has ever really pulled it off and it took them a monopoly and somewhat forced compliance to do so. Linuxes and such out there are getting far more widespread in terms of compatibility but again that is a burden shouldered by individual vendors and 'nix contributors. If Jobs wants to guarantee that your apple will run slick as shit, he can't really afford to pass that particular buck.
I'd just like to publicly thank nintendo for hopefully putting an end to the drama and politics surrounding the 'need some perspective' video game culture that is going off the deepend. Oh look a video game, pew pew pew, done! Privacy, spyware, contracts, wtf?
Is there a process for them to become established with a content license similar to that of a library? Libraries recieve book donations all the time and then index them (and provide a librarian!) so you can use your paid membership to borrow and read them. Not only are they enabling you to make copies, but they are providing you the content. How does the law work for libraries? If all else fails could they not simply purchase a copy of each book? Then there would not be much one could say about their fair use of the content that they own, since they are not redistributing it. People make profit from content they have purchased all the time, without reselling the content itself. They don't go back to the author of the book they used as the cornerstone of their research and give him half their Pulitzer prize money. I sure hope that the emphasis is on the content and their use of it, as opposed to what they are enabling others to do with it. I am really sick of the law getting involved in 'enabling technologies' and shutting them down, they hurt the world as a whole when they do this. Napster, torrents etc allow people to obtain illegal content. Guns allow people to put holes in other people. Shovels allow people to bury people with holes in them and get away scott free. Latex allows peopel to commit crimes without leaving finger prints. Get rid of that and prom's across America will instantly become less fun.