Especially popular among employers is offering unpaid internships. But, hey, you'll get experience, and you're passionate about your job, right?
829 karma · joined October 25, 2012
Unfortunately, the file is embedded on the Guardian website and can only viewed online.
A good example is University College London: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/admissions/msc_computer_science/
The so-called generalist programs are for non-CS majors, while the specialist programs are for people with a CS or related background. Degrees in the natural sciences commonly involve introductory programming courses, so those may be a good fit.
By the way, the few Americans I know who moved to Europe don't complain at all about the nominal wage differentials.
"There are 90 people in the photograph below. With the exception of a small number of outsourced assets, you’re looking at the entirety of the dev team across all disciplines. We've resisted the temptation to grow into a multi-studio team of hundreds, such as you often find behind games of similar scope to those we make."
I find it most astounding that Skyrim was made by a team of less than 100 people. It seems that these days it's not unheard of that hundreds or even more than 1,000 people work on a game. An example of the latter category is Grand Theft Auto IV.
There is the saying that the US has the world's 50 best universities --- but also the 5,000 worst. While this is an exaggeration, there is quite some truth in it. Just to reiterate my point: if you, as a foreigner, address a bus driver in Oslo in English, he will quite possibly reply in proper English. However, talk to a shopping clerk at Sainsbury's in England, or Target in the US, and you may have to concede that the language they speak is closer to pidgin than English.
Lastly, I'll let you know that I have attended graduate school at a top UK university, a place you have heard of. Interestingly enough, only about a quarter of the grad students were British, and according to the rector this was because many British schools and universities don't educate their students properly. Now you may also know that the UK school system does quite a good job separating the children of the plebs from the children of the rich.
Can you see what I'm getting at? Well, I'll just spell it out for you: a very large part of my fellow students in graduate school earned their undergraduate degree from public universities in Europe, which normally implied the complete absence of tuition fees. Yet, for some reason Britain's own talent found it difficult to compete with them. This mirrors the point another commenter has already made regarding the situation in the US, but since you're from Europe, I thought you might appreciate this perspective.
If you want to make the point that bolstering public education is a wasted effort, then think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system. Go on vacation there, and you'll be surprised, for instance, how well the average person there speaks English. Now compare this to the US or the UK where people usually don't bother learning a second language, and your average shop clerk has a hard enough time communicating in his mother tongue.
After an hour or two of playing this game, I couldn't help but think that this was carefully balanced, and little more than a clever attempt to stretch the length of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if I the creators of the game (Microsoft and Remedy) had some psychologist conduct studies on how long it takes for people to lose interest. I completed the game, but I felt like in some kind of stupor: never completely engaged, but never so bored that I wanted to quit. Something quite similar happens in MMORPGs where the "drop rates" of items are carefully balanced to maximize the time you invest. From a relevant article [0]:
"How to make players play hard.
Translated into the language we've been using, how do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity? Looking at our four basic schedules, the answer is a variable ratio schedule, one where each response has a chance of producing a reward. Activity level is a function of how soon the participant expects a reward to occur. The more certain they are that something good or interesting will happen soon, the harder they'll play. When the player knows the reward is a long way off, such as when the player has just leveled and needs thousands of points before they can do it again, motivation is low and so is player activity.
How to make players play forever.
The short answer is to make sure that there is always, always a reason for the player to be playing. The variable schedules I discussed produce a constant probability of reward, and thus the player always has a reason to do the next thing. What a game designer also wants from players is a lot of "behavioral momentum," a tendency to keep doing what they're doing even during the parts where there isn't an immediate reward. One schedule that produces a lot of momentum is the avoidance schedule, where the players work to prevent bad things from happening. Even when there's nothing going on, the player can achieve something positive by postponing a negative consequence."
That article makes for some chilling reading.
To get back to the point Michael was making: I do think that games nowadays are in general much more unappealing than they used to be. I know, I know, in the early 90s we had one platformer after another, but they often had quite distinct graphical styles and the mechanics didn't transfer 1:1 either --- just compare Mario to Sonic --- but today you've got one FPS after another, and almost all of them strive for realism and instant gratification a la Call of Duty. Many FPS games have absolutely identical mechanics, down to the button mapping. Storywise, FPS games are an absolute disaster. Very few games try to be different, like Spec Ops: The Line which provided a rather unusual emotional experience. Sadly, it sold very poorly.
[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game...
"His thesis, "A detailed study of gender stratification, resource allocation, and asphyxiation contingencies as manifested in the context of the submergent handicrafts of the peoples of the Aquacamamata Peninsula" was named Paper of the Year by the Maritime Anthropology Digest. Professor Dunne also holds an honorary degree in Professional Salon Services, and has starred in numerous bathroom fixture advertisements."
I'm not aware of a site that gathers MOOC reviews, but occasionally reviews get posted on Hackernews, which was the reason I submitted mine, too.
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/international/21568738-online-...
Just to mention a couple of examples:
- Earthbound (SNES) has a market value of up to over $300
- Chrono Trigger (SNES) normally sells for several hundred dollars as well.
- Neo Geo AES carts are coveted by collectors.
- Progear (CPS2) is one of the most sought after PCBs in the shmup scene, still selling for hundreds of dollars.
Also, sealed games sell for quite a premium.
I do think that if he took the time to sell the items individually, he would make more money. Then again, this would also involve a quite substantial investment of time.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with you that MOOCs are a boon. A well-structured course may be able to provide a better experience than working through a textbook on your own. Still, this doesn't mean that those courses live up to the hype.
Michael O.Church briefly talks about this in his article on startup culture: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-yo...
Also, see the recent HN post, "Ask HN: I just inherited 700K+ lines of bad PHP. Advice?": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557919
Lastly, in my article I highlight Open Office, which still has comments in German in its source code.
I am mostly concerned with "soft" aspects. Just consider the case where a student has to define variables, but picks variable names in a language other than English, or where control flow in a submission is more convoluted than it would have to be. Those are the cases I discuss in the article.
Moments ago, someone left a very fitting comment on my blog:
"I am taking the edX CS169.1 course and I find that I will consistently have a "less than elegant" solution that the auto grader accepts but that I feel is sub-par. The irony is this class has a large BDD/TDD aspect and is teaching RED-GREEN-REFACTOR, but with an auto grader once its green there is little reason to go back and refactor."