My "semester of C" was actually a "Data Structures and Algorithms" class that happened to be taught in C whereas every other class I took was related to COBOL, JCL, CICS on the mainframe (also with a semester in IBM 360 Assembly which was pretty cool!).

Rote lecturing as the primary education tool is hopefully on the way out. Teachers in the form of Coaches and Mentors are needed more than ever to help guide and inspire the future generations. I agree with you, this should be a hands-on, two-way interaction and for engineering, can definitely be that way even regardless of geography.

As a follow-up...

I remember doing some proof-of-concept testing on a new exotic piece of hardware for running Ultima Online servers in 1999. It was an 8 CPU (the idea of "cores" wasn't a common notion then) machine costing close to $100,000. We decided to stick with our existing configuration of using four quad-CPU machines which were far cheaper comparatively speaking.

Today, I can easily purchase and build my own 24+ core server machine at a fraction of that price and that's assuming I don't simply just rent some "cloud space" (yes, I feel a little dirty saying that haha) for my back-end processing needs. Mindblowing!

I've been in the game development industry for 18 years now having had the honor of being a major part of great projects like League of Legends and Ultima Online. My original training from the university was COBOL on big iron mainframes but as soon as I started coding professional, I knew I wanted to be a game developer. The public Internet was only accessible if you knew a local ISP and could get your Trumpet Winsock or equivalent configured correctly, Linux was just a quirky, novel whisper, Windows was still 3.11 and a TERRIBLE gaming platform, game publishers controlled the funding (and thus controlled the developers) and games were, for the most part, sold in boxes at brick and mortar store.

Despite having only had one semester of C in college (and never even heard of C++), I would rush home each night to hack away learning game programming from Andre Lamothe's Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus on my Gateway P90 (The Cow!) and landed my first job pretending to know C++ with a crappy demo I created for the interview.

Fast forward 18 years. Nearly unlimited bandwidth and online distribution capabilities, cheap hosting, many open platforms (from the point of view you don't have to get Publisher buy-in or permission) like Windows, Mac, Linux, Facebook, Android, iPhone for which to develop and run games. High quality game engines, tools and backends are available (Unity, Allegro, SDL, Apache, Glassfish, JBoss, MySQL, Flash, CSS/Javascript, etc). Even funding is now democratic and open with Kickstarter and YCombinator and not gated by publishers. The only limitation is one's ability to inspire people with a great idea. And for those wanting to delve further into hardware, we even have Arduino.

For me personally... I'm on the verge of launching my own personal cross-platform MMO built from the ground up that will run on just about any and every possible comuting platform on the planet and have the potential to reach anyone and everyone around the globe. I never would have dreamed that was possible 18 years ago! It's breathtaking...

Truly an amazing time to be an aspiring engineer!

Have to admit this made me chuckle! +1

Any and every job can feel like you describe when you're only in it for the money or simply don't have the right skills.

I've routinely hired new engineers in their late teens/early 20s straight out of college for $70K+. There's not many, if any, career paths that can boast entry level jobs with that starting point that don't require graduate level education or specialized training.

After reading through the first couple paragraphs, the tone of his whole article feels sensationalist and stereotyped to the point I really didn't care what he had to say. While it's fun to spout of hyperbole like "my computer illiterate producer who's only game play experience is Bejeweled" as if it represents what one thinks a whole industry is like regardless of reality, it's not very useful or constructive except for generating page hits.

I've spent 18 years in the game development industry (LoL, UO, TR, SWG, LOTRO, DDO) and while there are those occasional low points, it's not the norm.

One piece of advice he has which all budding indie game developers need to take to heart is do it for love and passion and don't expect to make any money out of it. If you do it for love and passion, players will notice and provide the greatest possible path to financial gain if your product is worth it. Regardless of financial world, you will have something that you created with that's genuinely yours and can leverage to land you bigger and better paying game gigs down the road. The key is to create something you love.

The current patent ecosystem, at least in regards to computer technology in general, has incentivized an environment of innovative litigation schemes rather than incentivizing true product innovation. Too many businesses and lawyers making money from schemes that do not produce (and never intended to produce) tangible results other than to sue for money on white paper ideas that never saw (and never expected to see) the light of day until some other entity actually (often unknowingly) puts in the effort of true innovation while tripping over hidden patent traps.

Thanks for the reply and +1 for giving me inspiring my personal education today as I looked up "bike shedding". Pretty informative and usable for future reference!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law_of_Triviality

Regulators don't have the same skin in the game that company executives have with their own company. Oversight committees and regulators will never have the same level of motivation to ferret out every little detail because frankly there's no financial incentive to do so. It's not like regulators will make any more money working harder and longer by discovering fraud than if they just put in their 9-5. C-level execs, on the other hand, stand to make huge windfalls with these kinds of large deals and will know every little detail, risk and reward of the deal and leverage every resource to discover every little detail before making a decision. HP management either was grossly incompetent at evaluating this multi-billion dollar purchase or willfully negligent for who knows what reason.

I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude during their evaluation in the purchase of Autonomy. What this really means is management failed to do their due diligence in evaluating Autonomy and now need to to distract from poor financial performance due to a lack of competence at the executive level.

In those cases, the inventor can profit without the need of legal protection and patents. They've created something novel which can easily be kept secret unless they give the source code away at which point they are knowingly and willingly sharing with the rest of the world their invention. If it's that useful to society, companies will pay for it since they can't simply copy it since there's nothing to "see" to copy except assembly code in a binary blob. Copyright will also still be in full effect.

In those cases, the inventor can profit without legal protection. They've created something novel which can easily be kept secret unless they give the source code away at which point they are knowingly and willingly sharing with the rest of the world their invention. If it's that useful to society, companies will pay for it since they can't simply copy it since there's nothing to "see" to copy except assembly code in a binary blob.

All great points! Yes, laws are hard to do especially in a way that produces the result you intend without a bunch of unintended side effects. And discussion of those details is how we arrive at details. I've thought a lot today about this just from this thread alone. Compounding the problem with coming up with generic laws are the reality that people's motives aren't always for the good of the whole but simply the good of themselves but they misrepresent or conceal their real intentions or distract from the real issues with strawman arguments.

You've given more to think about which I hope we all continue to do.

Drugs aren't the output of a single device or process. Drugs are the output of multiple devices and processes working to create a novel output and therefore patentable. Software is not the resultant output of multiple devices or processes.