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Comment An old quote (Score 1) 347

by Narbo (#42861235) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Alternative To the Canonical Computer Science Degree?

Back when I was in second year comp sci (mid/late 90s) we had a course which was roughly titled "Programming in C". The basics of C were covered in a single week; after that it was all about algorithms etc... One of the students asked the professor why we had gone over learning the language so quickly to which he gave an answer which has stuck with me to the current day:

"We are not here to teach you C. C is only a tool. We are here to teach you how to solve problems."

That's what your degree is about. Gaining the knowledge and background to solve problems.
User Journal

Journal Journal: .Tornados hit Springfield again 4

Journal by mcgrew

Lucky for me, it wasn't my Springfield, but the Springfield in Massachusetts. Unlike when the tornados hit Springfield, IL, the ones in Massachusetts killed four people. The AP article's description sounds exactly like what I went through:
Piracy

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

Posted by Soulskill from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

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