They're the same thing, you'll only get paid if you solve real problems (though that's not really true, a lot of people get paid by stealing - most of the finance industry, many government employees, and much of senior management in industry).
I'm not saying that entertainment doesn't have value. I said it's perfectly fine if you're earning an income from creating it and it's OK as a hobby to create. But otherwise, the market (the people that constitute the world) have told you it's not valuable.
Art for art's sake is great, but it doesn't mean artists should get a free pass to do whatever they want and the rest of us digging coal mines and waiting tables give them money for art we don't like.
Doesn't this guy realize that asking for money they way he did with flex funding defies logic. If you only raise some of the money, how were expecting to finish the project, and what about the people who gave you money - you just scammed them. He still hasn't paid them back yet, instead saying he owes them a game!
Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.
And another thing slightly disturbing about a lot of game devs - in your teens or early twenties I can understand the desire to make Indie games, you're young and retarded. But later on in life, late 20s and on - can you not find something more worthwhile to do?
Sure, a side hobby making games, or your main job working as a game dev to pay the bills, but for that be the focus of your life? Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?
You could say the same about other artists like writers and musicians - and thankfully, almost all of them suffer financially for their insanity. As time progresses, Indie gamers will also realize that they are just the starving artists of modern times (minus the groupies that writers and musicians get).
(you tamp down a little with your rudeness - why would multiple decades old tech be 'magical')
Prolog with clpfd and chr, Mozart/Oz, Sql, Clips. Libraries like gecode, java choco.
There aren't any new ways of programming that have been invented. There's basically the mathematical programming (constraint/logic/relational/linear), functional, procedural, oo, concurrent, stack. You're not going to come up with something new during a session of lisp hacking. You'll just reinvent the above multiple times.
But that's not the main style of programming. If you teach someone lisp he'll hack around with functions and macros and not realize that his problem could be elegantly written in constraint programming.
Most of the time the majority of code (written by good programmers) is in constraints or relations, so why encase that in a functional language with parenthesis everywhere (I've programmed a fair bit in lisp and don't mind parenthesis at all, but it get's annoying after you're used to the elegance of prolog syntax).
That's basically the consensus among professional academics on the matter. Also among well respected programmers in senior roles like Joshua Bloch and John Carmack.
(putting aside the rudenss and cluelessness of your comment ...)
Operations research type algorithms can be thought of as forward chaining compared to prolog's backward chaining. Prolog implementations usually integrate them in because they are more efficient in many cases.
Lisp's dangerousness was why ML was invented by Robin Milner.
A good modern introduction to programming is Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, by Peter Van Roy and Saif Haridi. It's far superior to the commonly mentioned lisp book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Slightly off-topic, Pdf and Ps are just plain outdated for today. They're unreadable on small screens and for people with bad eyesight, and no one sane prints stuff out these days Html is better, but the real thing today is tablet apps. All docs should be published as interactive 10/7/5 inch apps. Books should also disappear and be replaced by that form factor. Scientific paper authors also need to realize this and replace latex with app programming and publish their work as apps.
Virtual Reality, no doubt about it. Having tried the Oculus dev kit, VR will blow everything else away. The limitations currently, screen resolution and sensors, will be chipped away because they align nicely with the troubles smartphone makers have (smartphone makers want people to keep buying newer models, but there wasn't a good reason to until now - higher screen resolutions that are needed for VR - retina is no-where near retina in VR).
People will spend most of their day in VR - work, entertainment, socializing - and new forms of entertainment will arise that are hybrid between movies and games.
Huge fortunes are about to be made
- how much are eyeballs worth in VR as opposed to tiny screens ? (a lot)
- how much is it worth to replace most physical products, including real estate? (software eating the world in turbo-drive)
The best web platform is haskell and postgres, or ocaml-java/yeti and mysql on appengine. Phpers and rubyers are missing out on the most delightful and least error-prone ways to use functional and relational programming.
Online dating is still not as successful it could be because all data is not used. Everyone has smartphones, partners could be matched up based on the generated sensor data. There's also the low cost gene sequencing services, daters could be matched up using it.
The friendship problem cannot be tackled the same way. Women might be more open to actively seeking new platonic friendships in dating service kind of fashion, but they are less likely to be lonely anyway.
To solve the male loneliness problem would require focusing men around an issue. Men build good friendships over shared forced activities (school, work, military, political meetups, dinners with their wives's friends husbands).
To solve the loney man issue requires more of the same. Greater efficiencies in organizing economic/volunteery groups.
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is the answer here. Sites like mechanical turk and kickstarter with better social networking features, and finding ways to physically get people meeting together. For example, a component of kickstarter campaign might require doing a thousand man march in the capital city. Part of a mechanical turk task would require holding a protest. Similar ideas to get people excited about a shared cause meeting up at the same place.
Also, governments should consider creating an army units for elderly or otherwise lonely men. If your old and you're wife/husband died, you should be able to join the army to help in some capacity, even sitting at a desk at the barracks and filling in mechanical turk tasks.
This is kind of silly. If Google launched it's own uber with the google brand on it, it would easily trump uber. Developing the the uber software would cost way way less than $250 million. These large companies are throwing a lot of money away on stupid acquisitions. (It makes sense in social networking, but not with something like uber which isn't a network effects company).
I don't want to say anything against Patrick or other consultancy oriented entrepreneurs, but I'd just put up a price on the saas app and be done with it and move on with the next thing. I'm functionality-oriented, create a lot of functions that automate work and let the product sell itself.
It might be a little foolish and leaving money on the table but I just think more and more code is better than more and more marketing. Software should eat the world, and as fast as possible.