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The Minecraft Generation

nytimes.com

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Re: The Minecraft Generation

#41

Post by joezydeco »

zanny wrote: post #23
joezydeco wrote: post #18

These days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a fligh…

The idea of a corporate for-profit proprietary video game being the centerpiece of a generation's learning is horrifying and dystopian to me. It is the same problem the last generation had, in large part, with the public schooling Microsoft monoculture. Kids grew up on Windows 95 and Office and are now indoctrinated into Microsoft tooling, probably for life, as loyal customers. A very valuable investment on Microsoft…

The idea of a corporate for-profit proprietary video game being the centerpiece of a generation's learning is horrifying and dystopian to me.

Wait...are you referring to Roblox or Minecraft?

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#43

Post by joezydeco »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #22
joezydeco wrote: post #18

These days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a fligh…

Roblox is designed like an MMO. But that also has drawbacks. They charge like an MMO (monthly subscription), and you are beholden to their system/servers. I don't think I've ever gotten more value from a software purchase than buying Minecraft for €9.95 in 2010.

I think you can do a lot on the free tier, my son only recently started spending a little to unlock some of the upgrades.

Personally I'd rather see subscriptions fund a server that's always up. I've researched running my own Minecraft server for the local kids, but it's really not worth it.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#44

Post by e0m »

It's amazing what you can do with redstone these days. YouTube effectively turned into the GitHub of redstone. I can't imagine how much more powerful this could be if you could "fork", "clone", and "pull request" red stone designs and compose them as easily. Most people rebuild each and every single bit from scratch.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#45

Post by dsp1234 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #26
peeky wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interview people like this all the time. I'm long enough in the tooth to have been using telnet regularly, and it terrifies me that so many people doing what I was doing 20 years ago have found a path to obsolescence in an industry with such a critical skills shortage.

This bothers me. How are people interviewing for (presumably) admin positions without this knowledge? When I interviewed for my first real job they included a programming "test". It was basic C stuffs (really, more C pointer focused). Things like 4 swap functions, each incorrectly implemented, what are the resulting values of a and b after running swap(a,b) or swap(&a,&b), etc. Apparently, I found out after getting h…

How are people interviewing for (presumably) admin positions without this knowledge?

Because once you've logged in to the box, administration via telnet and SSH is exactly the same. It's not that they don't have admin skills, they just don't have updated security skills.

It's not awesome, but if the interviewer doesn't think to ask about SSH skills, and the interviewee doesn't realize their skill is out of date, it's easy to miss.

How often is the focus on what to do once logged in, as compared to how to log in in the first place?

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#46

Post by Razengan »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #28
zanny wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a corporate for-profit proprietary video game being the centerpiece of a generation's learning is horrifying and dystopian to me. It is the same problem the last generation had, in large part, with the public schooling Microsoft monoculture. Kids grew up on Windows 95 and Office and are now indoctrinated into Microsoft tooling, probably for life, as loyal customers. A very valuable investment on Microsoft…

>> "It is the same problem the last generation had, in large part, with the public schooling Microsoft monoculture. Kids grew up on Windows 95 and Office and are now indoctrinated into Microsoft tooling, probably for life, as loyal customers. A very valuable investment on Microsoft's part to capture the computer knowledge of a large portion of a generation." I don't think this is as big of an issue as you think. I wo…

Same here. Born into a Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 household, grew up on PC/DOS and spent the majority of my life on Windows, deep inside the Microsoft galaxy, but now I've settled into Macs and OS X.

I think games used to be the big differentiator for many people, more so than office software, but now the gap is decreasing rapidly on all fronts. Apple needs to revisit the Mac mini as a low-cost entry into their ecosystem and make it an attractive PC in its own right as well. I know they're going to be adamant about GPU upgradability, but they should at least promote the Thunderbolt-based external GPUs and help them be a viable solution.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#47

Post by kraftman »

e0m wrote: post #44

It's amazing what you can do with redstone these days. YouTube effectively turned into the GitHub of redstone. I can't imagine how much more powerful this could be if you could "fork", "clone", and "pull request" red stone designs and compose them as easily. Most people rebuild each and every single bit from scratch.

Can they not just import the schematics with WorldEdit?

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#48

Post by whybroke »

zanny wrote: post #23
joezydeco wrote: post #18

These days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a fligh…

The idea of a corporate for-profit proprietary video game being the centerpiece of a generation's learning is horrifying and dystopian to me. It is the same problem the last generation had, in large part, with the public schooling Microsoft monoculture. Kids grew up on Windows 95 and Office and are now indoctrinated into Microsoft tooling, probably for life, as loyal customers. A very valuable investment on Microsoft…

Minecraft is now owned my Microsoft.

Given that an uncontrolled market will always favor consolidation, there is at least one obvious step to prevent the dystopia you mention.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#49

Post by jcrawfordor »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #32
k-mcgrady wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "It is the same problem the last generation had, in large part, with the public schooling Microsoft monoculture. Kids grew up on Windows 95 and Office and are now indoctrinated into Microsoft tooling, probably for life, as loyal customers. A very valuable investment on Microsoft's part to capture the computer knowledge of a large portion of a generation." I don't think this is as big of an issue as you think. I wo…

As an alternative point of view, I've always heard that HP calculators were killed by TI giving free calculators to schools - which lead to an entire generation that had no desire to learn RPN, even if it has some serious advantages in a lot of areas. The counterexamples you provide (OSX and Chromebooks) follow basically the same UI paradigms as the Windows machines they replaced (even if some of those might have bee…

I don't think HP's RPN calculators were ever in competition with TI. The RPN calculators like the 12C are marketed to finance professionals, and TI has nothing like them. The HP graphing calculators like the 50g are infix (although there is a pretty good RPN app available).

Edit: I do see that HP made graphing calculators with native RPN in the late '80s, so perhaps they were pushing these for academic markets, although today they seem to be the provence of surveyors.

Random aside: I first learned RPN from my father, a budget analyst, and have used it ever since. RealCalc is an Android calculator app with an excellent RPN mode, if you're curious.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#50

Post by jenscow »

kefka wrote: post #21
_asummers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno man, the amount of people who say "FTP server" with a straight face, not realizing that credentials are transmitted in plaintext, is alarming.

An FTP server is perfectly fine for anonymous logins, assuming it was configured server side to be running as a low permissioned user. But yes, once you start taking user credentials, you need to move to something like FTPS or SFTP (urgh... double standards).

But authentication goes both ways.
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