I don't necessarily disagree. But I thought the comment I was reacting to was too one-sided. True, the expectations about the production values and the price level are stricter. But development in general is cheaper and the customer base is larger.

Additionally, the expectations on game graphics are not that hard on the developers. A new iteration of an existing engine is enough - sometimes with barely noticeable changes.

On the other hand, the software development industry has moved on significantly since the early 1990's:

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- development tools are more reliable, languages more fool-proof
- there are extensive frameworks available - graphics, communication, logging - myriads of well tested libraries for pretty much anything
- development processes are better understood and are readily supported by various development tools
- automated testing and building software is much better
- operating systems are much more robust

These are all things that make development much cheaper and more stable.

And then we see the presentation of the new Call of Duty and its great new innovation is the inclusion of a dog. Where exactly do the $100 million (or whatever the ridiculous amount is) go?

While mostly valid points, there are a couple of strange ones:

Why should this be a problem for a battery switching system? Isn't it much easier to cool the batteries when they're outside of the car? Seems like this is a case of an advantage for the swapping system.

This is also an advantage of the swapping system. Batteries are the most rapidly degrading part of the car. Assuming they are good for 500 charges and the range is 100 miles, they will need to bee replaced after 50 000 miles. So you'll need more batteries than cars upfront, but in the long run, you will keep discarding the degraded batteries without an additional hassle to the owners and it will even out.

The OP didn't say it wasn't. He just said Xbox One does not have any advantages to Steambox, just downsides.

It's because he was the one who infringed on the patent - he used Roundup on his crops meaning he actually used Monsanto's technology. Also, the elevator most probably sold the soybeans legally - for processing, not for planting.

I still see no 'hacking' part in it

Consider a case where you have a senile cashier in your local grocery store and you find out that if you buy a certain combination of items and give him a 10 dollar bill, he'll confuse it with a 100 dollar bill and give you $92 back.

Would you call that hacking?

However, if you notice that the elderly clerk is not at the register and ask the manager to call him because you really like to do business with him personally, you might be conducting a fraud.

Many companies - especially the industrial ones - work on long business cycles. Things like assembly lines or CT scanners are supposed to run for decades.

Imagine a company producing CT scanners who's been on the market for some time. They would have dozens of versions of their scanners in the field, some of them more than a decade old, using old software. To update an old system with new software (such as one supporting new browsers) requires to run a full round of system tests. In the case of medical software, it's even mandated by government regulation.

This would mean you would have to rebuild all 20 (or more) machines in your test lab to perform the tests (simulators are not good enough for FDA) at a huge cost. On top of that, you might not even be able to get some of the parts for the machines that were produced in the previous millennium.

I assume you didn't read into the case. The prosecutors were never trying to argue that Nestor (the accused) used hacking to find the glitch. They were trying to argue that the combination of keys that activates the glitch is so complex that it should by itself be considered 'hacking'.

However, the 'combination of keys' used was not that extraordinary - all were legal game-play moves. Boiled down to the fact that switching a denomination of a game could change the payout the machine would give you on games you already won (but did not cash out yet).

The prosecution was trying to paint is as access rights violation but they failed to show just what exactly did the defendants do that they were 'not entitled' to do.

It still might be a fraud. Especially since Nestor convinced the operator in one case to switch on the feature that enabled the glitch. But hacking is out of the question.

äiti in Finnish

Apparently the Finns separated from the general population way before the ice age.

Gun related crimes are not being done using legally held weapons. You're no better off with a printed gun than you are with a black market S&W. In one case you leave traces of your presence in the black market, in the other you leave traces of downloading the schematics from the internet. In the long run owning a 3D printer and gun schematics will be equal to having the means to murder someone. If your average Joe Blow has an opportunity and a motive on top of that, he'd still get busted.

The most important thing is to show them that there is a demand for what you do. This is where great ideas make it or fail. Henry Ford didn't invent mass production. It's just that nobody thought there would be enough demand for so many automobiles. Same goes for every other successful enterprises. Who would want a personal computer? Who would want a phone without physical buttons?

So who wants your stuff? How much do they want it? How much are they willing to pay for it?

I wholly agree on that. But in addition, the deeper problem seems to be that the incentive for the colleges is to have as many graduates as possible - that's where the cash flow comes from. I think that's the reason why they've become a bit loose on the requirements.

Sure. So let's look at the examples I've given (real problems I've encountered):

Meaning - knowing how the concept of exceptions work, knowing how file system works conceptually and have a basic idea of what relational databases are.

Are you saying these are too specific and not in the scope of CS/SW Engineering degrees? I don't buy that. I KNOW these things are in software and CS related curriculi. I'm just irritated by the fact that people who don't grasp these basic things still get the degree.

Maybe the whole concept of colleges in engineering is broken. I've met with people with a CS masters degree who didn't understand the concept of exceptions, were wondering why you can't just insert a string into the middle of a text file and were surprised that you can have more than one table in a SQL database.

I'm not saying that every graduate is bad but that even the reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have no business having them.

If I look at the (CS/SW related) degree from the employers perspective, all that it grants is that the holder knows how to use variables, loops and branching in programming and that he/she has a rudimentary idea about what a compiler, an OS and a file system is. Is that really worth the 4-5 years and $100K (and more) spent on a something a high school kid could learn in half a year?

That produces a disconnect between the graduates expectations and the company's requirements - the graduate has invested time and money into his degree and expects a salary of a professional and the company doesn't want to pay that much for somebody with so little training. I believe the really good graduates do actually get god jobs out of school - it's just the average and below average people who cannot get employed.