There does seem to be a certain mistrust of video game design courses. A lot of employers thing that kids just go into them because they figure game development is an easy glamorous job that involves playing games all day. Ads about tightening graphics don't help with this image.
Even beyond "mistrust" or bias, if you're applying for a programming job outside the graphics/videogame field, it would seem that having a degree focused on a CS subset you won't be using puts you at a disadvantage.
Have there not already been two articles on slashdot about how game developers are forced to work 14 hour days, six days a week? Also, isn't that stuff all being offshored, or given to guest workers?
There have been several. Game programmers get treated like crap because almost everyone with computer skills would rather be working on Epic Warfare 5 than Generic_Financial_Database. As a result, there's a real over-supply of talent, more so than other fields. Hollywood has the same problem with writers and actors/actresses. In the absence of SAG/WGA rules, the sheer weight of the fanfic writers and "was in a play in high school" actors willing to work for peanuts for a shot at becoming the next JJ Abrams, Tom Cruise, or Julia Roberts would dramatically force down writer and actor wages and working conditions.
That's the problem though. Why would a prospective employer not in the gaming field take a video game design major over a CS major, all things being equal?
Have you seen the forum trolls in WoW? You change a spell coefficient on a spell they've used like once in the last year, and they scream so loud you'd think he shot him in their face. I'd not want to use my real name there.
They defined 'denial-of-service' as denying the city the ability to administrate its network without Terry Childs, and I think that's legitimate and clearly the case.
Except that it's not.
If that's the case, then every sysadmin is guilty of denial of service when they leave their job (for whatever reason) - because we know how the systems work.
Quit? That's denial of service.
Get fired? That's denial of service.
Get hit by a bus and spend a year in a coma? That's denial of service.
It's patently absurd for this to be considered "legitimate".
No, because if you are fired or quit and you give your successor the necessary access (whether giving him the root password, or adding him to sudoers or whatever), you're not denying them the service. Basic professionalism demands that you don't screw over your employers when leaving. Don't toss gum in the machinery on your way out the door, and don't lock authorized users out of vital systems.
Obviously a coma's involuntary and shouldn't be criminalized, but I'd think most competent people should have a contingency plan for that (whether that's a copy of the relevant keys/passwords in a safe deposit box only your wife knows about or a dead man's switch or having a second co-worker with the passwords or whatever).
What Terry Childs did was make himself invaluable by refusing to give a successor access. That's not legitimate, because you don't own the servers, your boss does.
There's an article in The Guardian about how the authorities asked the plane manufacturers to take part in discussions about volcanic ash safety levels but they weren't interested.
Well yeah, because if they give estimates, and they're wrong, planeloads of people die, and they have a PR disaster and a pile of lawsuits. Balanced against that is a nice thank-you note. Tough call.
By your logic, if I can con the Indian Tech Support guy for Talking Hello Goofy into believing that I'm the lost heir of Walt Disney, then Disney has to turn over the keys to the Magic Kingdom.
No, I understand why you disassemble it if you're buying stolen property and publicizing it to drum up web hits, but if you're trying to return the phone, and you have the guy's name and facebook page and know he works at Apple, why do you have to take it apart?
California Penal Code 485 requires only "reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him".
And taking the phone home from the bar with him, calling Apple's Tech Support line, and then selling it qualifies as "reasonable and just efforts"? Any 12 jurors you find are going to ask the obvious question - "If you wanted to return the phone, why not either give it to the bartender or just facebook the guy?" Those are two blindly obvious ways to get the phone back to its owner that require minimal effort. He knew which bar it was lost in, and he (according to Gizmodo) saw the guy's Facebook page on the phone before it got wiped. There's no way you're going to convince a jury that "reasonable and just efforts" don't include either or both of those steps.
"...and knowingly having purchased stolen property."
I'm not getting how you concluded this part. Up until the time Gizmodo examined and concluded the device was actually Apple's property, they could not have known it was a lost prototype and who knows whether they had verified that a credible effort had not been made to return it.
You're saying you think Gizmodo regularly spends $5,000 buying used iPhones? They wouldn't have spent $5,000 on the phone if they didn't believe it to be an actual prototype, and no tech journalist would believe that Apple just up and gave a prototype to some random Joe.
So what was with all the dis-assembling then? Even if someone buys your insane premise that the only way to get the phone back to Apple was to publish the fact that they had one, why did he take it apart? Did he think Apple wouldn't recognize it without the pictures of the phone's guts and all its tech specs in the article?
Instead, this really is about an inadvertant (or deliberate?) leak and did involve stolen property.
If it were a deliberate leak, Gizmodo wouldn't have posted the personal info of the guy who lost the phone. They wouldn't dickishly stab their co-conspirator in the back and deny him the ability to get new employment in the short term.
So if I con some Customer Service rep in Bangalore into saying that I'm the true and rightful heir of Walt Disney, then they have to turn over the keys to the castle?
Yeah, because he called their customer support line. It seems silly to me to argue that some first-level CS representative in Bangalore working off a script qualifies as an official Apple representative. They had the name of the employee the phone belonged to, and you can Google for Apple's address pretty easily. Stick it in a manila envelope and ship it to them with a bill for the postage.
A finder could easily have popped out the SIM card to look at its labeling.* From there, a finder could have contacted the carrier and asked that the carrier request the subscriber to give him a call for return of the device. It defies belief that none of these experienced tech journalists would have realized this possibility existed.
Given that they knew the guy's name because they saw his facebook profile on the phone before he bricked it remotely, it seems like they could have skipped all that and messaged him on Facebook. Or stuck it in a box and FedEx'd it to ATTN:[Guy's Name], 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino CA.
Oh there's plenty of room for debate on that. People love shouting the "Bush is the worst ever" hyperbole because he's just the worst during their lifetime.
An argument about whether Bush is the worst President or merely the second-worst or third-worst isn't really flattering to the ex-President.
My own vote for worst president ever is Andrew Johnson. Did a complete 180 on Lincoln's policies, vindictively screwing over the South in the process. Took decades for state economies to recover. Guy was pretty much an all-around dick too.
Oh please. Basically all the Reconstruction stuff was passed of Johnson's veto. Johnson was way, way less vindictive towards the South than the majority of the Northern politicians in Congress. Johnson may have been worse than Lincoln, but he was an order of magnitude less extreme than Congress was. Wherever you come down in terms of Reconstruction, it's silly to blame Johnson for it.
My God! How can something like this possibly get by QA as a company the size of McAfee? Have they outsourced all of their QA to a team with no clue?
If it only hits certain versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, it's possible McAfee testing didn't cover those versions for some reason. Given all the various patches, updates, and service packs for Windows 2000 or XP, either one of those is gonna have dozens if not hundreds of possible states for SVCHost.exe, depending on which patch it received. Of course, if it affects the fully-updated build or all the builds, that's no excuse.
I'm not saying that is what happened, I'm saying that that could possibly get by QA at a large company. Testing against every permutation of Windows update would mean thousands of installations of Windows to test.
The problem this solves is a financial company's tendency to say "the model predicts this complex asset has a value of $Money" without explaining the model and its assumptions. Forcing them to show you the model lets you decide how much you think the asset is worth, and how full of crap the bank is. I'm sure if you asked in 2009, many banks had the modeled value of sub-prime mortgage derivatives at like 50 cents on the dollar or something, because they built their models to show a value that wouldn't make them bankrupt, instead of a more realistic value like 10 cents/dollar. This regulation would make it easier to call them on that stuff.
No - there is a difference in it that I think most people would agree on. With a trailer, you are trying to build hype for the movie. Get its name out there and make it desirable to watch.
...I grab a demo which means I'm already interested in seeing what the game is like. I use the demo to determine whether or not I want to purchase it.
The difference is that it's harder to juice up a demo than a movie trailer. You can just throw all the good bits into the trailer (funny lines, robots fighting, whatever) and make a good trailer out of all but the crappiest of movies, but not so for game demos. The game demo highlights the mechanics of the game, which you don't usually change between the demo and the final version. I mean, if I play the Call of Duty 7 demo, that's basically how the game is going to play out. There might be one or two mechanics missing from the demo, but it's unlikely that the game company's going to be able to put "only the good stuff" in the demo.
Yeah, paying that much for a donor egg would render your intellect questionable
Raising a child is an expensive proposition. It's somewhere in the $200k range, just for the food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care for 18 years. Then you toss on all the prenatal, neonatal, and postpartum medical bills, along with college, and it all adds up to a huge pile of money. Further, that assumes nothing goes wrong (no teen pregnancy or delinquency, no serious medical problems). At that point, spending an extra 1% for better genes doesn't seem as extravagant, and is probably a good investment.
All the financial issues aside, parents generally want what's best for their kids, and will go to great lengths for them. If getting an egg donor with good genes offers their kid a promising future, it's something prospective parents will prioritize almost irrationally.
According to EVE Online's quarterly report that just came out, the most common ships in PvP are the Rifter (T1 cruiser you can fly by day 2) and the Drake (takes 3-6 weeks to fly well).
"Less than half a year" to fly a battlecruiser? I'm 5 days away from my Alliance's reimbursement fit Drake, and I've been playing for 6 weeks. Yeah, that's named T1 launchers instead of T2, but it's certainly a decent ship. And I don't see why this is seen as an EVE-only flaw. Unless you hook up IVs and play 24/7, it'll take you a few months to hit the level cap in WoW. I'd wager "time to level cap" and "time to T1 battleship" (which are decent PvP ships) are roughly equivalent, and when you throw in the WoW gear grind, getting into Interceptors, Interdictors, or T2 Cruisers probably takes as long as getting all the epic loot you need to go knock on the doors of Icecrown Citadel (WoW's top raid).
The flip side of that is that now we have Standardized Tests that students must pass, and those numbers matter even more to the school, since too high a failure rate costs you your federal funding. So now schools would rather drop failing kids than keep them sitting in classes.
I think the difference has to do with software architecture and with demographics. Windows XP is still used by like 60% of web users (and 2/3 of Windows users), whereas OS X Tiger is used by only like 15% of Mac users (and thus only like 1% of overall web users).
And once you're supporting XP, Win2k is basically a freebie in terms of effort needed to support it. By contrast, there are major API differences between Leopard and Tiger - you have to use a different compiler, a different text renderer, and you can't use some of the newer Leopard APIs.
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There does seem to be a certain mistrust of video game design courses. A lot of employers thing that kids just go into them because they figure game development is an easy glamorous job that involves playing games all day. Ads about tightening graphics don't help with this image.
Even beyond "mistrust" or bias, if you're applying for a programming job outside the graphics/videogame field, it would seem that having a degree focused on a CS subset you won't be using puts you at a disadvantage.
Have there not already been two articles on slashdot about how game developers are forced to work 14 hour days, six days a week? Also, isn't that stuff all being offshored, or given to guest workers?
There have been several. Game programmers get treated like crap because almost everyone with computer skills would rather be working on Epic Warfare 5 than Generic_Financial_Database. As a result, there's a real over-supply of talent, more so than other fields. Hollywood has the same problem with writers and actors/actresses. In the absence of SAG/WGA rules, the sheer weight of the fanfic writers and "was in a play in high school" actors willing to work for peanuts for a shot at becoming the next JJ Abrams, Tom Cruise, or Julia Roberts would dramatically force down writer and actor wages and working conditions.
That's the problem though. Why would a prospective employer not in the gaming field take a video game design major over a CS major, all things being equal?
Have you seen the forum trolls in WoW? You change a spell coefficient on a spell they've used like once in the last year, and they scream so loud you'd think he shot him in their face. I'd not want to use my real name there.
They defined 'denial-of-service' as denying the city the ability to administrate its network without Terry Childs, and I think that's legitimate and clearly the case.
Except that it's not.
If that's the case, then every sysadmin is guilty of denial of service when they leave their job (for whatever reason) - because we know how the systems work.
Quit? That's denial of service. Get fired? That's denial of service. Get hit by a bus and spend a year in a coma? That's denial of service.
It's patently absurd for this to be considered "legitimate".
No, because if you are fired or quit and you give your successor the necessary access (whether giving him the root password, or adding him to sudoers or whatever), you're not denying them the service. Basic professionalism demands that you don't screw over your employers when leaving. Don't toss gum in the machinery on your way out the door, and don't lock authorized users out of vital systems.
Obviously a coma's involuntary and shouldn't be criminalized, but I'd think most competent people should have a contingency plan for that (whether that's a copy of the relevant keys/passwords in a safe deposit box only your wife knows about or a dead man's switch or having a second co-worker with the passwords or whatever).
What Terry Childs did was make himself invaluable by refusing to give a successor access. That's not legitimate, because you don't own the servers, your boss does.
There's an article in The Guardian about how the authorities asked the plane manufacturers to take part in discussions about volcanic ash safety levels but they weren't interested.
Well yeah, because if they give estimates, and they're wrong, planeloads of people die, and they have a PR disaster and a pile of lawsuits. Balanced against that is a nice thank-you note. Tough call.
By your logic, if I can con the Indian Tech Support guy for Talking Hello Goofy into believing that I'm the lost heir of Walt Disney, then Disney has to turn over the keys to the Magic Kingdom.
No, I understand why you disassemble it if you're buying stolen property and publicizing it to drum up web hits, but if you're trying to return the phone, and you have the guy's name and facebook page and know he works at Apple, why do you have to take it apart?
California Penal Code 485 requires only "reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him".
And taking the phone home from the bar with him, calling Apple's Tech Support line, and then selling it qualifies as "reasonable and just efforts"? Any 12 jurors you find are going to ask the obvious question - "If you wanted to return the phone, why not either give it to the bartender or just facebook the guy?" Those are two blindly obvious ways to get the phone back to its owner that require minimal effort. He knew which bar it was lost in, and he (according to Gizmodo) saw the guy's Facebook page on the phone before it got wiped. There's no way you're going to convince a jury that "reasonable and just efforts" don't include either or both of those steps.
"...and knowingly having purchased stolen property."
I'm not getting how you concluded this part. Up until the time Gizmodo examined and concluded the device was actually Apple's property, they could not have known it was a lost prototype and who knows whether they had verified that a credible effort had not been made to return it.
You're saying you think Gizmodo regularly spends $5,000 buying used iPhones? They wouldn't have spent $5,000 on the phone if they didn't believe it to be an actual prototype, and no tech journalist would believe that Apple just up and gave a prototype to some random Joe.
So what was with all the dis-assembling then? Even if someone buys your insane premise that the only way to get the phone back to Apple was to publish the fact that they had one, why did he take it apart? Did he think Apple wouldn't recognize it without the pictures of the phone's guts and all its tech specs in the article?
Instead, this really is about an inadvertant (or deliberate?) leak and did involve stolen property.
If it were a deliberate leak, Gizmodo wouldn't have posted the personal info of the guy who lost the phone. They wouldn't dickishly stab their co-conspirator in the back and deny him the ability to get new employment in the short term.
So if I con some Customer Service rep in Bangalore into saying that I'm the true and rightful heir of Walt Disney, then they have to turn over the keys to the castle?
Yeah, because he called their customer support line. It seems silly to me to argue that some first-level CS representative in Bangalore working off a script qualifies as an official Apple representative. They had the name of the employee the phone belonged to, and you can Google for Apple's address pretty easily. Stick it in a manila envelope and ship it to them with a bill for the postage.
A finder could easily have popped out the SIM card to look at its labeling.* From there, a finder could have contacted the carrier and asked that the carrier request the subscriber to give him a call for return of the device. It defies belief that none of these experienced tech journalists would have realized this possibility existed.
Given that they knew the guy's name because they saw his facebook profile on the phone before he bricked it remotely, it seems like they could have skipped all that and messaged him on Facebook. Or stuck it in a box and FedEx'd it to ATTN:[Guy's Name], 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino CA.
Oh there's plenty of room for debate on that. People love shouting the "Bush is the worst ever" hyperbole because he's just the worst during their lifetime.
An argument about whether Bush is the worst President or merely the second-worst or third-worst isn't really flattering to the ex-President.
My own vote for worst president ever is Andrew Johnson. Did a complete 180 on Lincoln's policies, vindictively screwing over the South in the process. Took decades for state economies to recover. Guy was pretty much an all-around dick too.
Oh please. Basically all the Reconstruction stuff was passed of Johnson's veto. Johnson was way, way less vindictive towards the South than the majority of the Northern politicians in Congress. Johnson may have been worse than Lincoln, but he was an order of magnitude less extreme than Congress was. Wherever you come down in terms of Reconstruction, it's silly to blame Johnson for it.
My God! How can something like this possibly get by QA as a company the size of McAfee? Have they outsourced all of their QA to a team with no clue?
If it only hits certain versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, it's possible McAfee testing didn't cover those versions for some reason. Given all the various patches, updates, and service packs for Windows 2000 or XP, either one of those is gonna have dozens if not hundreds of possible states for SVCHost.exe, depending on which patch it received. Of course, if it affects the fully-updated build or all the builds, that's no excuse.
I'm not saying that is what happened, I'm saying that that could possibly get by QA at a large company. Testing against every permutation of Windows update would mean thousands of installations of Windows to test.
The problem this solves is a financial company's tendency to say "the model predicts this complex asset has a value of $Money" without explaining the model and its assumptions. Forcing them to show you the model lets you decide how much you think the asset is worth, and how full of crap the bank is. I'm sure if you asked in 2009, many banks had the modeled value of sub-prime mortgage derivatives at like 50 cents on the dollar or something, because they built their models to show a value that wouldn't make them bankrupt, instead of a more realistic value like 10 cents/dollar. This regulation would make it easier to call them on that stuff.
No - there is a difference in it that I think most people would agree on. With a trailer, you are trying to build hype for the movie. Get its name out there and make it desirable to watch.
...I grab a demo which means I'm already interested in seeing what the game is like. I use the demo to determine whether or not I want to purchase it.
The difference is that it's harder to juice up a demo than a movie trailer. You can just throw all the good bits into the trailer (funny lines, robots fighting, whatever) and make a good trailer out of all but the crappiest of movies, but not so for game demos. The game demo highlights the mechanics of the game, which you don't usually change between the demo and the final version. I mean, if I play the Call of Duty 7 demo, that's basically how the game is going to play out. There might be one or two mechanics missing from the demo, but it's unlikely that the game company's going to be able to put "only the good stuff" in the demo.
The Ninth Doctor did the same thing - he intended to take Rose back to the day after she left with him, and it turned out to be a year.
Yeah, paying that much for a donor egg would render your intellect questionable
Raising a child is an expensive proposition. It's somewhere in the $200k range, just for the food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care for 18 years. Then you toss on all the prenatal, neonatal, and postpartum medical bills, along with college, and it all adds up to a huge pile of money. Further, that assumes nothing goes wrong (no teen pregnancy or delinquency, no serious medical problems). At that point, spending an extra 1% for better genes doesn't seem as extravagant, and is probably a good investment.
All the financial issues aside, parents generally want what's best for their kids, and will go to great lengths for them. If getting an egg donor with good genes offers their kid a promising future, it's something prospective parents will prioritize almost irrationally.
According to EVE Online's quarterly report that just came out, the most common ships in PvP are the Rifter (T1 cruiser you can fly by day 2) and the Drake (takes 3-6 weeks to fly well).
"Less than half a year" to fly a battlecruiser? I'm 5 days away from my Alliance's reimbursement fit Drake, and I've been playing for 6 weeks. Yeah, that's named T1 launchers instead of T2, but it's certainly a decent ship. And I don't see why this is seen as an EVE-only flaw. Unless you hook up IVs and play 24/7, it'll take you a few months to hit the level cap in WoW. I'd wager "time to level cap" and "time to T1 battleship" (which are decent PvP ships) are roughly equivalent, and when you throw in the WoW gear grind, getting into Interceptors, Interdictors, or T2 Cruisers probably takes as long as getting all the epic loot you need to go knock on the doors of Icecrown Citadel (WoW's top raid).
The flip side of that is that now we have Standardized Tests that students must pass, and those numbers matter even more to the school, since too high a failure rate costs you your federal funding. So now schools would rather drop failing kids than keep them sitting in classes.
I think the difference has to do with software architecture and with demographics. Windows XP is still used by like 60% of web users (and 2/3 of Windows users), whereas OS X Tiger is used by only like 15% of Mac users (and thus only like 1% of overall web users). And once you're supporting XP, Win2k is basically a freebie in terms of effort needed to support it. By contrast, there are major API differences between Leopard and Tiger - you have to use a different compiler, a different text renderer, and you can't use some of the newer Leopard APIs.