I believe those articles demonstrate several things, but it's impossible to tell in what proportions:

* Educational indoctrination from birth, censorship, and propaganda seem to be effective
* Some are afraid to say what they really think, especially when being quoted on the record
* Some don't mind authoritarian regimes or censorship

It's important not to draw conclusions solely from what people say when there are obvious external factors which may be influencing the truthfulness of their statements. The poll data linked in the second article indicated the information was gathered from phone calls and in-person interviews, which means the people responding could not be certain their opinions weren't being tracked or monitored in some way. If you can get in trouble for criticizing the government, and then poll people to see if they have any criticisms of the government, are you surprised when they tell you they have no real complaints?

That makes a lot more sense. I couldn't even imagine how load times could be 45 minutes. Those are build times, not load times.

Still, that wasn't their only complaint. Whatever their technical merits, the team ended up unhappy with Unity, and seemed much more happy with Unreal, apparently. In the end, we'll probably find out if the real problem was the tools or the developers who couldn't use them properly when we see the final game - the proof of the pudding, if you will.

But not WW2. People do learn. Only took a few million deaths of their youngsters to do it.

If you read the article, the $500 fee isn't really the primary issue. It's only particularly galling because it appears that the fee is used to license a product that's more or less a workaround for an abysmally poor-performing editor. That fee is in *addition* to everything else, if I understand correctly. I mean, 45-minutes to load a project? Are you kidding me? How do you even manage that on modern hardware? There's nothing more frustrating than a clunky workflow or limited tools that you have no way of fixing yourself. That really seemed to be the driving factor in the switch.

I've worked on large games before (200+ developers). We used our own custom engine and tools, and our designers could start up the game editor and be working in about half a minute or so. It's not impossible to keep things nice and snappy for the end users, even with *massive* amounts of content. You just have to be a bit clever about things.

I think that's a potential problem with a company that does nothing but write engines for others to use. They don't have to actually talk to the people that are suffering because of poor decisions they made, or crappy limitations that they never bothered to address. It makes a big difference when you can walk down the hall and watch people at work using the tools you made. There's a pretty big difference between a fully featured game and little tech demos or samples.

Damn, I still can't get over that 45-minute+ load time. There would be blood flowing in the isles if we made our designers go through that, and rightly so.

Someone who buys a product with others' tax money is still a drain on the economy, because not only was there a loss of revenue from an actual worker / producer used to buy that product, there was also overhead in the transfer of that revenue. It can no more be a net benefit back to the economy than a perpetual motion machine can sustain its own energy.

Whether or not you feel someone is "working" or not, if their capital is invested, that money is then being used to move the economy forward. Business borrow money in order to expand product lines or upgrade equipment. Individuals borrow money to purchase a car or a home. However, it's dependent on people having capital to invest. In other words, even if someone isn't working, their money probably is. And make no mistake, there's not enough wealth at the top to pay for the government's current spending levels. We could tax the top 10% at 100% rates and it wouldn't even fix our current deficit.

It's unwise to base fiscal policy on emotions such as jealousy towards wealthy people or a desire for social justice. Blaming the rich for not paying their fair share make for great politics but poor fiscal policy.

The scientists and engineers that design the US nuclear weapons have computational problems that are measured in CPU months. A senior scientist was talking to a consultant, and explained the importance of these simulations.

"Just think about it.", he said. "If we get those computations wrong, millions of people could accidentally live."

-credit to the unknown US nuclear scientist who told this joke to Scott Meyers, who in turn relayed it at a conference.

What if I don't want to slice my cabbage thin? What are you, some sort of cabbage Nazi? Hitler probably liked thin sliced cabbage too!

Godwin's Law

I think it's fair to say that we've reached a point where we're flying "fast enough" for most practical purposes. Flying to the other side of the world only takes about 18 hours or so, which is pretty amazing, and the fast majority of flights are much shorter hops. Once cost, safety, reliability, and noise all reach a point where they can't be easily improved, aerospace engineers will probably start pushing harder against the speed barrier again. It's not that there's no impetus, it's just that there are currently higher priorities.

I think there are some interesting parallels to the improvements of tech components. We may be approaching a stabilizing trend because our computers are becoming "fast enough" for darn near whatever most people need to do with them, and because the physics for making components smaller and faster are really starting to get in the way. At some point, computers will be fast enough that they'll do whatever people want them to do, and there will be very little impetus to make them significantly faster. Besides gaming or other high-end jobs, personal computers are already ridiculously overpowered for what the user actually demands of them. And a lot of performance issues can simply be blamed on poor software design or overly deep and inefficient software abstractions. Note how the last two Windows OSes have actually *improved* CPU and memory performance since Vista, which was a pretty notorious hog.

I suppose this explains why most people are probably better off with a smartphone or a tablet, and why PC sales are dropping. I think the PC isn't dying so much as finding a more appropriate niche within the computational power spectrum.

In a large percentage of the projects I've worked on, most of the game code was in C++ too, with scripts used for more specialized tasks and customization. The trend of writing large portions of game logic (like AI) in scripts has fallen out of favor for the projects I've worked on, for a variety of reasons. That's not to say we didn't use them extensively in more focused areas though.

I'm not sure what that had to do with what I was discussing. Just because I don't think affirmative action is morally justifiable or effective doesn't mean I believe women should be paid less. But what the heck, let's go there...

Simple economics factor can explain the discrepancy between K-12 and college professors. There are far fewer available tenured positions at colleges, and the educational requirements are tougher to become a professor. Highly trained specialists always get paid more. So of course a college professor will earn more than a K-12 teacher.

However, that doesn't explain the gender gap within the tenured professorship level. Note that fields such as science and engineering tend to command higher salaries, and since these are male dominated, it likely skews the results. We'd really have to see male/female salaries per department and at roughly equivalent experience levels and professional credentials / awards, or else we're comparing apples to oranges. If we compare apples to apples and see a disparity, then of course, that indicates a problem.

As far as K-12, all grades typically use the same pay scale, and of course, aren't different for men and women.

Did you just assume that high school teachers earned more than kindergarten teachers? Or are you suggesting that college professors earn more than kindergarten teachers simply because of sexism?

I don't doubt that such sexism exists, but even were it to disappear completely, I still don't believe men would be interested in teaching kindergarteners in any significant numbers. Were I to consider a teaching job, my enthusiasm would drop as the student's age decreased. I like younger kids just fine, but I sure wouldn't want to spend all day, every day teaching them. I'm just a sampling of one, of course, but those rates makes perfect sense to me, and it has nothing to do with others' perceptions.

You seem to be implying that were the sexism to disappear, the ratios would be significantly different. I'm curious how much difference you feel there would be? It's obviously just speculation on my part, but my gut feeling is that it might make for a few percentage points of difference, but nothing dramatic.

I think our efforts are better expended trying to stamp out racism and sexism, improve the economic situation so as to better afford equal opportunity, and then let people work in whatever job they damn well feel like taking on, instead of according to some social-agenda schedule. I'm pretty sure a lot of people advocating this sort of affirmative action have the best of intentions, but I feel it's trying to fix the symptoms rather than the problem. Even worse, when you're talking about the different interests of men and women, you may end up trying to "fix" an imbalance that occurs naturally because of our inherently different interests.

Why is it so hard to believe that men and women might be interested in different careers or have different interests? Do you think it's because of artificially stamped "gender roles" that society imposes on men and women? Doesn't it make sense that our societal mores and roles simply tend to align with gender-specific traits and talents evolved over the last hundred thousand years or so? Those traits, of course, are largely driven by biological realities, so unless men start giving birth, it makes no sense for them to compete with women for the role of nurturer and caregiver.

I'm sure some might think of me as a neanderthal for my shocking assertion that men and women have fundamentally different skills, interests, and behaviors because of biology, but it seems like common sense to me.

Men in teaching positions (as of 2011, from US Bureau of Labor statistics):

Kindergarten teachers: 2.3%
Grade school teachers: 18.3%
Secondary school teachers: 42.0%

Is this a problem? Personally, I don't think so. It just means that more women are interested in teaching younger children, and the men who are there are because they want to be. I doubt there's some grand conspiracy to prevent men from becoming kindergarten teachers. Just like there's no conspiracy to keep women out of tech jobs.

I think the biggest danger is that the minority may tend to feel marginalized, or feel unfortable because they stand out among their peers. In IT I can imagine it may get uncomfortable for women there, especially since that crowd is not especially known for being socially adept to begin with. I've met a number of prickly personalities myself, and if directed toward women, could be viewed as sexism, when it may just be an asshole acting true to his nature.

Still, there's undoubtedly some cases of real sexism as well, and that needs to be stomped hard when it comes to light. But institutional racism or sexism? I certainly haven't seen it, but admittedly I'm apparently in the "favored" columns for the IT field.

Ah, yeah, the good old 8051. I only know about it because I worked on some robotics projects in school, so my memories of that chip are probably fonder than your reality of having to maintain production code for them. Nowadays I think some programmers couldn't even imagine working with 128 or 256 bytes of run-time memory, and having to carefully allocate every single bit.

I'm glad to hear your company has gotten on board with those new-fangled source control thingies. :-) Please tell me you're not using CVS at least.

Keep pushing for unit testing if you can, although keep the approach low-key or your co-workers will just dig in their claws. Maybe see if you can discretely squeeze in some time to do some proof-of-concept demonstrations. Unit testing doesn't have to be complex or use a bunch of fancy frameworks, so it might be easier to sell the concept if they can look at some very simple C code (or whatever you use) and see how it works in practice. People get too caught up into making fancy frameworks, because programmers love writing systems, while occasionally forgetting that the point is not the system but the results.

Interesting list, thanks!

E-mail authentication seems like a better solution than whitelisting in the long term. Whitelisting can kill off spam, but that's sort of like saying you can fix a broken arm by amputation. It's technically true, but removes a lot of useful functionality.

The big problem with e-mail spam is that the e-mail sender can be trivially forged. If we employed ubiquitous authentication systems that proved a specific domain was used, and blocked non-authenticated users (or at the very least, flag them with a big warning), it would go a long way to solving the spam problem. Moreover, if a particular domain is repeatedly being used by spammers or scammers, that can provide additional heuristic information to the filters.

Unfortunately, there are too many competing authenticating standards and (presumably) far too much legacy code that would be broken by moving to such a system. Given the ridiculous amounts of spamming and scamming going on by e-mail, it really seems like it would be worth the short-term pain to buckle down and select a single, robust solution, and block anything that doesn't use it.

The world just isn't the same when the SMTP protocol was invented. It's ridiculous, not to mention slightly worrisome, that the only way we can practically use e-mail is if the combined technical might of Google or some other large enterprise helps us to filter out 99% of the crap so we can view the 1% that isn't.

Heuristics could pretty easily determine if someone communicate only in English in their e-mails, and as such, any legitimate e-mails that contain large amounts of non-English words or characters should be viewed with greater suspicion. For those that routinely communicate in more than one language and use non-ascii sets, the heuristic should be able to account for that fact.

These sorts of rules are always fuzzy by nature. Obviously, whether an e-mail is determined to be legitimate or not is due to many different factors. This could simply be one of those contributing factors.