No, his stupidity is in voicing an opinion at all on a subject he even admits he is completely ignorant of. The guy has made a career out of reviewing movies, which he clearly considers art, yet as a medium movies have been around for no time at all and for a good part of their early life they had exactly the same criticisms levelled at them as he's now levelling at games. You'd think even he would be bright enough to realise he might just make himself look stupid by voicing his opinion, but for some people the ego always wins out.
I guess the reason movies have such a hard time being taken seriously is because of the amount of garbage Hollywood churns out? Or that music isn't considered art because of all the awful buskers? Or novels aren't art because of cheap pulp fiction romance novels? Or paintings are rendered not-art because of all the potato-prints stuck to the fridges of parents around the world? I wasn't aware that a particular field being massively over-populated with the mundane was reason enough to justify it not being taken seriously as a medium for art. To be honest I think a lot of this comes down to snobbery - most of what we, today, recognise as the great art forms were, at the time, derided by the cultural elite, lapped up by the unwashed masses and only found favour later. After all, in his time Shakespeare was just another bawdy playwright churning out entertainment for the kind of people who just wanted to laugh at penis jokes and throw peanuts at the actors.
The difference is, of course, that GP wasn't saying Ebert's favourite films or your graphic novels weren't art, in some deliberately derisory and hence inflammatory manner.
Does it really matter - is he the final arbiter of what constitutes art? Art is incredibly subjective at the best of times, there's no way we're all going to agree on a rigid definition that will let us measure if something is or isn't art, I don't see why people are getting worked up about this. If you see art there, then that's all that matters, whether others can see it or not - van Gogh died as a mostly unrecognised artist, yet now his paintings change hands for millions and are recognised as masterpieces. Just because one man lacks the foresight to see something as art, doesn't mean it isn't.
No, what it will do is teach stupid people that it doesn't matter which way the batteries go... until they use any of the millions of devices where it *does* matter, then they'll still call you up and ask you to fix it, only now you have to work out if it's a device where polarity does or doesn't matter on top of every other possibility for how they broke it. If getting the batteries the right way round is too difficult, then adding something which introduces more complexity or room for doubt (unless every single device switches to it, which is less likely to happen now it's patented) is almost always a bad idea.
As a business their goal is to make money, not to be clever or innovative (the two are obviously not mutually exclusive but neither does the one automatically follow the other). The success of this venture is not in the design, it's in selling it. If that new Porsche is twice as expensive as the old one, you might be happy to forgoe a little of the speed and comfort.
I'd mostly agree (I like their keyboards and mice, I know they're not to everyone's tastes but for me they seem to represent a good balance of price, reliability and usability), however, as a long-term XBOX owner, I could tell you a few bad things about MS hardware...
The thing is, you can only really list the inventions where there was a genuine problem, or at least an obvious solution that, after the fact, made everyone's life easier. You can't name the failures because, well, they were failures, we mostly never even got to see them. Only time (and marketing) will tell if this is a successful idea or not.
No, the real story in determining if we'll "benefit" from it in the long run is how realiable it is and how costly it is. If it makes devices noticably more expensive or prone to break, I think most people would see the real benefit as residing in a little sticker labelled with +/-.
I'm just worried about them combining it with the Zune. It's bad enough thinking about Ballmer squirting at people without realising he's employing InstaLoad technology.
There are lots of inventions that seem obvious in retrospect but which greatly improve one's daily life (the sink things from your example). Then there are inventions that are obvious but do little other than to add to the production cost. I guess if you're a professional photographer or something this might be useful (although I think a lot of pros use those battery caddies pre-loaded so they don't need to think about this anyway), but for the average person who might use their camera three or four times a year and their camera phone the rest, I think they'd rather have a cheaper product where you just visually look which way the batteries go (I know I would). I can't really think of a battery hungry device other than a camera where this would be useful these days - most things either require battery changes so infrequently (remote controls, etc) that it's not worth increasing the cost/complexity to save a couple seconds every couple of years, or else they're using cell batteries and generally get recharged without the battery being removed (mobile phones, laptops, etc). Maybe torches are one example where it would be nice to not have to put the batteries the right way around (since the point you reach for one is likely when the lights have gone out).
The very fact that the solution is so easy and yet nobody's done it before should be proof enough that it's a solution without a problem. People are perfectly fine with getting the batteries the right way around. I guess the fact that they came up with a "trendy" name for it will mean it'll be in all cameras (making them more expensive for no real benefit) by this time next year though.
I think his point is that your degree is pretty much meaningless outside of university - and if you're expecting to lead a full working life, it will be a looong way behind you before you're even halfway to retirement. What counts is ability and experience (and honestly the latter is far more likely to get you a job, because the former is very hard for an employer to test). What's the point retraining if you've already got lots of relevant experience? My degree is in law, I haven't used it once, I work in web development and I have many years of experience working with some of the most well known brands in the UK - I could go retrain because I have a useless degree, but why would I? If you really think qualifications mean anything at all after about three years of commercial experience, you're either still in uni/school or you're seriously deluding yourself.
And how many of those burger flippers have the same aspirations? Okay, even taking into account that there probably are a lot of people working there who just don't have the skills to go further, there are still probably a lot who had exactly the idea you expressed, there are only so many management positions available per burger monkey. It's also not particularly well paid work (when I did tech support many moons ago, we had a former manager come work the phones with us because the money was comparable and he felt the prospects were better - and that was by no means a fantastically well paying job), I know money's not the be-all-end-all, but if you're going to be stuck there for a while trying to prove yourself then it's definitely another consideration.
I think he means an easy degree with at least the perception of being able to get a relatively well paid job at the end of it (I can't comment on how easy CS is, but I saw plenty of slackers scrape through on my degree course with the bare minimum grades). If you like playing with computers then it probably would seem like an easy option, just as a sports related degree seems like an easy option if you enjoy sports, but might sound like too much effort to the average basement dweller.
I guess that depends if they're relying on state payouts to survive - the way this works in the UK is that you have to show that you're actively looking for work, and that includes applying for X number of jobs (I think 3 minimum, something like that) each week. Maybe it's easier for a CS grad to show they're applying for plenty of jobs (but not getting them due to experience or whatever), while an art school student might have a much smaller pool of jobs to draw from and as such might end up being forced to take a job outside their field or lose their benefits much sooner.
The key is being pro-active and proving your skills and commitment before you graduate. Offer your services (for free if necessary) to some real life companies and build up a portfolio of real, commercial experience. The main issue I see with CS recruitment is that university doesn't really teach you enough real world skills - of course this is the same for most university courses, but we don't expect a doctor or a lawyer to just turn up on day one and produce the goods, they're trained on the job, while CS grads are expected to be productive from the outset (no firm wants to offer low wages to train someone up and have them leave when they've got the commercial experience, similarly no firm wants to offer good wages to an untested graduate, so it's catch 22 unless you can do something to shift the balance or are lucky enough to find a firm that will take a punt on you).
The only way for an employer to judge if you will be productive is on past experience, which obviously puts graduates at an immediate disadvantage. If I had to guess how GP got into his current position (assuming he's not just making it up), I'd guess he got off his backside and did some work on his portfolio before he left uni, if you just assume good uni grades will land you a high paying job or freelancer contract, you're in for a shock.
But then games that do away with the health bar but still have the concept of health risk annoying the player, too. One of my only gripes with Red Dead Redemption is that I'd quite like to know how much health I have when I'm in a gunfight, can I risk sticking my head out of cover for one more shot before wasting a health pack, or will that throw me back to the start of the encounter, I shouldn't have to judge that by how red the screen's turned (hmm, is that crimson or ruby, I can't tell!).
ME:2 at least tries to give them some purpose, such as being able to target a gas pipe to kill a bunch of guys to make the next fight slightly easier, but it's still frustrating, especially having already played through the game once, to be forced to watch a scene you already know (you can actually skip most scenes in ME:2 except the ones where you can interact) when you're just eager to get into the action.
Just make them skippable - the people who want to see the cool move get to, the people who don't want to be annoyed by having to randomly mash some button are happy, I know they probably spent a lot of money on that cut-scene but if I don't want to watch it there's little advantage in forcing me to, I won't thank the developers for it.
And just as bad, it means you don't get any breathing space in between intense scenes because you can't just think "oh, cutscene, I'll just relace for a minute" as you said, you have to watch the screen like a hawk or be forced to sit through the whole thing again. On top of that, it completely kills any replay value - I'd like to be able to replay the game (on a harder difficulty setting for instance) and just skip these parts once I know the story, being forced to sit through them to catch some pointless interaction is frustrating, does anyone find this "fun" or believe that it brings anything to the experience?
The fire part was one of the best scenes I've ever encountered in a game - you always knew it (or something like it) was coming, but when it happened you really felt like the rules of the game had completely changed, suddenly you're not being hand held through a simple puzzle, you're dropped into a situation where you have to use what you've learned and instantly react or die, and the character of GLaDOS played such a massive part in building the atmosphere leading up to that.
My biggest bug bear is when you figure something out in a game but then you're not rewarded for your insight, instead you're punished by being forced to play out a scenarior when you know it will go badly for your character. Like, you've pieced together the clues to realise that the guy who is helping you is really the killer, but you can't just shoot him in the back, you have to play along with his weak subterfuge while he leads you into a trap, or you're playing some survival horror game and you just know a zombie is going to leap out of that closet when you walk past it, but you can't riddle it with bullets before you get to it.
Actually, anything with zombies almost always does this badly - you'll always have scenes where you know the dead bodies on the ground will spring to life (or unlife, or whatever) at some point, but you can't hack them to pieces until the story has played out, similarly with deactivated robots (I'm looking at you ME:2) that you can't just smash to pieces while they're offline, even though you've already seen them suddenly spring to life a dozen times before, your character is happy to leave them intact but deactivated and just take his chances. Not rewarding me for anticipating a trap is massively jarring to the immersion, especially when I then have to sit there and watch my dumb character realise that it's a trap and try and fight his way out of it - I just end up thinking, you expect me to empathise with this god damn clown?
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No, his stupidity is in voicing an opinion at all on a subject he even admits he is completely ignorant of. The guy has made a career out of reviewing movies, which he clearly considers art, yet as a medium movies have been around for no time at all and for a good part of their early life they had exactly the same criticisms levelled at them as he's now levelling at games. You'd think even he would be bright enough to realise he might just make himself look stupid by voicing his opinion, but for some people the ego always wins out.
I guess the reason movies have such a hard time being taken seriously is because of the amount of garbage Hollywood churns out? Or that music isn't considered art because of all the awful buskers? Or novels aren't art because of cheap pulp fiction romance novels? Or paintings are rendered not-art because of all the potato-prints stuck to the fridges of parents around the world? I wasn't aware that a particular field being massively over-populated with the mundane was reason enough to justify it not being taken seriously as a medium for art. To be honest I think a lot of this comes down to snobbery - most of what we, today, recognise as the great art forms were, at the time, derided by the cultural elite, lapped up by the unwashed masses and only found favour later. After all, in his time Shakespeare was just another bawdy playwright churning out entertainment for the kind of people who just wanted to laugh at penis jokes and throw peanuts at the actors.
The difference is, of course, that GP wasn't saying Ebert's favourite films or your graphic novels weren't art, in some deliberately derisory and hence inflammatory manner.
Does it really matter - is he the final arbiter of what constitutes art? Art is incredibly subjective at the best of times, there's no way we're all going to agree on a rigid definition that will let us measure if something is or isn't art, I don't see why people are getting worked up about this. If you see art there, then that's all that matters, whether others can see it or not - van Gogh died as a mostly unrecognised artist, yet now his paintings change hands for millions and are recognised as masterpieces. Just because one man lacks the foresight to see something as art, doesn't mean it isn't.
No, what it will do is teach stupid people that it doesn't matter which way the batteries go... until they use any of the millions of devices where it *does* matter, then they'll still call you up and ask you to fix it, only now you have to work out if it's a device where polarity does or doesn't matter on top of every other possibility for how they broke it. If getting the batteries the right way round is too difficult, then adding something which introduces more complexity or room for doubt (unless every single device switches to it, which is less likely to happen now it's patented) is almost always a bad idea.
As a business their goal is to make money, not to be clever or innovative (the two are obviously not mutually exclusive but neither does the one automatically follow the other). The success of this venture is not in the design, it's in selling it. If that new Porsche is twice as expensive as the old one, you might be happy to forgoe a little of the speed and comfort.
I'd mostly agree (I like their keyboards and mice, I know they're not to everyone's tastes but for me they seem to represent a good balance of price, reliability and usability), however, as a long-term XBOX owner, I could tell you a few bad things about MS hardware...
The thing is, you can only really list the inventions where there was a genuine problem, or at least an obvious solution that, after the fact, made everyone's life easier. You can't name the failures because, well, they were failures, we mostly never even got to see them. Only time (and marketing) will tell if this is a successful idea or not.
No, the real story in determining if we'll "benefit" from it in the long run is how realiable it is and how costly it is. If it makes devices noticably more expensive or prone to break, I think most people would see the real benefit as residing in a little sticker labelled with +/-.
I'm just worried about them combining it with the Zune. It's bad enough thinking about Ballmer squirting at people without realising he's employing InstaLoad technology.
Do we really want to make life easier for the people who are baffled by battery diagrams? Natural selection has a lot going for it.
Well, when you shut down you're starting the kill processes, so it makes a kind of sense.
There are lots of inventions that seem obvious in retrospect but which greatly improve one's daily life (the sink things from your example). Then there are inventions that are obvious but do little other than to add to the production cost. I guess if you're a professional photographer or something this might be useful (although I think a lot of pros use those battery caddies pre-loaded so they don't need to think about this anyway), but for the average person who might use their camera three or four times a year and their camera phone the rest, I think they'd rather have a cheaper product where you just visually look which way the batteries go (I know I would). I can't really think of a battery hungry device other than a camera where this would be useful these days - most things either require battery changes so infrequently (remote controls, etc) that it's not worth increasing the cost/complexity to save a couple seconds every couple of years, or else they're using cell batteries and generally get recharged without the battery being removed (mobile phones, laptops, etc). Maybe torches are one example where it would be nice to not have to put the batteries the right way around (since the point you reach for one is likely when the lights have gone out).
The very fact that the solution is so easy and yet nobody's done it before should be proof enough that it's a solution without a problem. People are perfectly fine with getting the batteries the right way around. I guess the fact that they came up with a "trendy" name for it will mean it'll be in all cameras (making them more expensive for no real benefit) by this time next year though.
I think his point is that your degree is pretty much meaningless outside of university - and if you're expecting to lead a full working life, it will be a looong way behind you before you're even halfway to retirement. What counts is ability and experience (and honestly the latter is far more likely to get you a job, because the former is very hard for an employer to test). What's the point retraining if you've already got lots of relevant experience? My degree is in law, I haven't used it once, I work in web development and I have many years of experience working with some of the most well known brands in the UK - I could go retrain because I have a useless degree, but why would I? If you really think qualifications mean anything at all after about three years of commercial experience, you're either still in uni/school or you're seriously deluding yourself.
And how many of those burger flippers have the same aspirations? Okay, even taking into account that there probably are a lot of people working there who just don't have the skills to go further, there are still probably a lot who had exactly the idea you expressed, there are only so many management positions available per burger monkey. It's also not particularly well paid work (when I did tech support many moons ago, we had a former manager come work the phones with us because the money was comparable and he felt the prospects were better - and that was by no means a fantastically well paying job), I know money's not the be-all-end-all, but if you're going to be stuck there for a while trying to prove yourself then it's definitely another consideration.
I think he means an easy degree with at least the perception of being able to get a relatively well paid job at the end of it (I can't comment on how easy CS is, but I saw plenty of slackers scrape through on my degree course with the bare minimum grades). If you like playing with computers then it probably would seem like an easy option, just as a sports related degree seems like an easy option if you enjoy sports, but might sound like too much effort to the average basement dweller.
I guess that depends if they're relying on state payouts to survive - the way this works in the UK is that you have to show that you're actively looking for work, and that includes applying for X number of jobs (I think 3 minimum, something like that) each week. Maybe it's easier for a CS grad to show they're applying for plenty of jobs (but not getting them due to experience or whatever), while an art school student might have a much smaller pool of jobs to draw from and as such might end up being forced to take a job outside their field or lose their benefits much sooner.
The key is being pro-active and proving your skills and commitment before you graduate. Offer your services (for free if necessary) to some real life companies and build up a portfolio of real, commercial experience. The main issue I see with CS recruitment is that university doesn't really teach you enough real world skills - of course this is the same for most university courses, but we don't expect a doctor or a lawyer to just turn up on day one and produce the goods, they're trained on the job, while CS grads are expected to be productive from the outset (no firm wants to offer low wages to train someone up and have them leave when they've got the commercial experience, similarly no firm wants to offer good wages to an untested graduate, so it's catch 22 unless you can do something to shift the balance or are lucky enough to find a firm that will take a punt on you).
The only way for an employer to judge if you will be productive is on past experience, which obviously puts graduates at an immediate disadvantage. If I had to guess how GP got into his current position (assuming he's not just making it up), I'd guess he got off his backside and did some work on his portfolio before he left uni, if you just assume good uni grades will land you a high paying job or freelancer contract, you're in for a shock.
But then games that do away with the health bar but still have the concept of health risk annoying the player, too. One of my only gripes with Red Dead Redemption is that I'd quite like to know how much health I have when I'm in a gunfight, can I risk sticking my head out of cover for one more shot before wasting a health pack, or will that throw me back to the start of the encounter, I shouldn't have to judge that by how red the screen's turned (hmm, is that crimson or ruby, I can't tell!).
ME:2 at least tries to give them some purpose, such as being able to target a gas pipe to kill a bunch of guys to make the next fight slightly easier, but it's still frustrating, especially having already played through the game once, to be forced to watch a scene you already know (you can actually skip most scenes in ME:2 except the ones where you can interact) when you're just eager to get into the action.
Just make them skippable - the people who want to see the cool move get to, the people who don't want to be annoyed by having to randomly mash some button are happy, I know they probably spent a lot of money on that cut-scene but if I don't want to watch it there's little advantage in forcing me to, I won't thank the developers for it.
And just as bad, it means you don't get any breathing space in between intense scenes because you can't just think "oh, cutscene, I'll just relace for a minute" as you said, you have to watch the screen like a hawk or be forced to sit through the whole thing again. On top of that, it completely kills any replay value - I'd like to be able to replay the game (on a harder difficulty setting for instance) and just skip these parts once I know the story, being forced to sit through them to catch some pointless interaction is frustrating, does anyone find this "fun" or believe that it brings anything to the experience?
The fire part was one of the best scenes I've ever encountered in a game - you always knew it (or something like it) was coming, but when it happened you really felt like the rules of the game had completely changed, suddenly you're not being hand held through a simple puzzle, you're dropped into a situation where you have to use what you've learned and instantly react or die, and the character of GLaDOS played such a massive part in building the atmosphere leading up to that.
My biggest bug bear is when you figure something out in a game but then you're not rewarded for your insight, instead you're punished by being forced to play out a scenarior when you know it will go badly for your character. Like, you've pieced together the clues to realise that the guy who is helping you is really the killer, but you can't just shoot him in the back, you have to play along with his weak subterfuge while he leads you into a trap, or you're playing some survival horror game and you just know a zombie is going to leap out of that closet when you walk past it, but you can't riddle it with bullets before you get to it.
Actually, anything with zombies almost always does this badly - you'll always have scenes where you know the dead bodies on the ground will spring to life (or unlife, or whatever) at some point, but you can't hack them to pieces until the story has played out, similarly with deactivated robots (I'm looking at you ME:2) that you can't just smash to pieces while they're offline, even though you've already seen them suddenly spring to life a dozen times before, your character is happy to leave them intact but deactivated and just take his chances. Not rewarding me for anticipating a trap is massively jarring to the immersion, especially when I then have to sit there and watch my dumb character realise that it's a trap and try and fight his way out of it - I just end up thinking, you expect me to empathise with this god damn clown?