Comment Respects (Score 1) 1521
Just wanted to say thanks for everything, Rob. Been reading
Colin
Preserving Virtual Worlds 122
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so:
"Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
Comment Liberal Arts education (Score 1) 991
I would just like to further emphasize this point. As someone in the position of hiring a number of CS students, I've found that most of them have difficulties communicating with folks who aren't of a CS background. They would benefit from a liberal arts education, being exposed to a wide variety of disciplines and schools of thought, and likely draw from it connections to other fields they might have assumed (a priori) didn't exist. In fact, the interdisciplinary opportunities for CS students with liberal arts training are myriad at present, and only look to increase in number.
Take social networking for example. There are not enough CS folks in this field who possess some training in sociology, psychology, or anthropology. This is one of the gripes I hear from researchers - that there are not enough CS students who understand these other fields, resulting in weak contributions or flat out screw ups.
Perhaps in no other field is the chance for interdisciplinary work more evident, and since there aren't enough multi-discipline CS students out there right now, I would recommend exploring the liberal arts option.
Take social networking for example. There are not enough CS folks in this field who possess some training in sociology, psychology, or anthropology. This is one of the gripes I hear from researchers - that there are not enough CS students who understand these other fields, resulting in weak contributions or flat out screw ups.
Perhaps in no other field is the chance for interdisciplinary work more evident, and since there aren't enough multi-discipline CS students out there right now, I would recommend exploring the liberal arts option.
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