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A High-School Hacker's Notebook

An anonymous reader writes: "Remember those high-school lunchtimes, back in the day, when you and your computer-nerd friends would hang out by the Krunch Korral, discussing that cool computer game that you were all going to write? And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."

337 comments

  1. I had one too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And then I burned it because I realized how stupid it was to keep it on paper. All in the head now.

  2. Better ways to publish.. by OrangeSpyderMan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There have to be better ways to put those pages on the web than dozens of jpegs....

    --
    Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
    1. Re:Better ways to publish.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So that's why it slashdotted so fast. Obviously not much of a hacker if he couldn't figure out how to work OCR.

  3. Mine was similiar by clinko · · Score: 4, Funny

    Mine was similar, but it wasn't a game, it was a business that sold pet supplies online. A friend of mine (a great puppeteer) thought of a good sock mascot. Then, we were going to spend all our money on 1 huge superbowl commercial. We were going to make millions!!!!

    1. Re:Mine was similiar by dmorin · · Score: 2

      Speaking of which has anybody seen the television commercial that apparently *bought* the sock puppet? Some sort of car insurance company or something. There's the pets.com puppet, back from the dead.

    2. Re:Mine was similiar by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 1

      Perhaps it was Geiko? In a recent commercial, they also had the now-unemployed Taco Bell chiuahua auditioning to be the Geiko spokescreature. Naturally, the gecko got the job.

    3. Re:Mine was similiar by bokmann · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's a car insurance company called 'Geico'. they had a series of commercials with a large 'waiting room' of people as if they were trying out for a commercial spokesman competition. It was pretty funny.... if you looked through the crowd, they had ALL KINDS of sponsors from commercials past...

      Incedentally, GEICO is a large insurer around the washington, DC area... I'm not sure if they are across the U.S. GEICO stands for Government Enployees Insurance Company... but they have been a commercial company serving the general public for a long time (20+ years).

    4. Re:Mine was similiar by telstar · · Score: 2

      I've still got one of those puppets sitting on my desk.

    5. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, and they suck when it comes to claims. They ripped me off big time, and I wouldn't have put up with their shit, but I had a deal already in the works for my new car and needed the check from the heartless bastards! I guess they waste all of their money on producing worthless stupid commercials (which are on the air every 5 minutes), instead of paying the full value of claims.

    6. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      These guys are one of the most expensive insurance comapnies out there. Compare their rates some time.

      I figure that the only way they stay in business is that there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't shop around for a better deal.

    7. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, I shopped around after GEICO jacked my rates, and saved $258 every 6 months. If Progressive raises my rates $1 I will go shop around again. I won't go so far as to get no-name insurance, but I will shop all of the major companies looking for a descent rate!

    8. Re:Mine was similiar by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 1

      Oh, you young guys with your Internet-wired high schools. Sometimes I think Internet access stifiles creativitiy, why develop anything when you can surf all day? (BTW I am not claiming exempting from this)

    9. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Weird, I just switched from Prgressive to GEICO and saved $200/6 months. I suppose they will try to screw me later--every other insurance company has.

    10. Re:Mine was similiar by a+hollow+voice · · Score: 1

      Can't remember who it is, but I've seen a car dealership commercial (looks local) using the pets.com puppet as their mascot. They come right out and admit it too, without mentioning pets.com specifically - the idea of the commercial is that they're giving the puppet a second chance, and that everybody deserves a second chance (on their bad credit).

    11. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is pretty much my experience. Having to shop around each time I make a change, such as moving, or adding another vehicle, they will attempt to put the screws to me. It doesn't matter I have a perfect driving record, each company forces me to do more shopping. Saving $400 just for a half an hour's worth of shopping makes sense in my book.

    12. Re:Mine was similiar by wesmills · · Score: 2

      It's for Bar None (1-800-BARN-ONE, heh), a tote-the-note auto loan company. They say they've given the puppet a second chance, just like everyone "deserves a second chance on credit."

    13. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would have done that but I didn't know anyone in school who was into computers and I didn't have much direct access to computers (except the shitty macs at school) until I was almost an adult because my parents thought that the computer was nothing but a toy and always ground me from it for every little thing under the sun... in fact, for 99.999999% (perhaps all but a few days in four years) the computer just sat collecting dust and being used for solitaire by other family members.

    14. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They are quite crappy, yes. I got in a small accident when I was 17. They cut off my parents insurance because of it. I couldn't have caused more than a few K of damage, too. My parents had to sign a contract stating that I would never drive one of "their" cars again (it was my car) for them to have their policy back.

      And they're paying WAY too much.

      Avoid GEICO. They'll boot you for practically nothing.

    15. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, Progressive did that to me too. They claimed they don't "re-quote" in under 2 years, so you get the same crappy rate the whole time, or more based on changes. Even on a 6 month policy.

      So say you're just starting out with insurance. Progressive has a policy where you pay less if you've had 6 months of insurance. So you'd think you'd get a better rate after 6 months of clean history with them? Nope! You'e gotta shop around.

      Progressive is fun though - you can get around it by just signing up for new insurancce again. Sometimes they catch you, sometimes not.

      Insurance is just a plain ol scam though, all around, so I'm not so bothered by having to work a little to save some money.

    16. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      geico is in california too, i'd imageine their nationwide

    17. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it was a business that sold pet supplies online. A friend of mine (a great puppeteer) thought of a good sock mascot.

      You guys must really be upset about losing the mascot. I hired him, he says you guys are billionaires off all his consulting work. He advises me on important business decisions. I am not rich yet, but he says it will be soon. Is $85K a year plus bennies a lot for a sock puppet?

    18. Re:Mine was similiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nationwide is a different company, but we do have Geico in NY too.

    19. Re:Mine was similiar by nelsonal · · Score: 2

      Geico, is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett's insurance conglomerate) they offer insurance nationwide, except for New Jersey, the Insurance Commission and most insurance companies are having difficulty seeing eye to eye on alot of issues, and maybe Alaska & Hawaii. They're pretty cheap, about the same as the other discounters, like progressive, due to not having branch offices. I've personally found amica to be cheaper then the others, but you do need to have a clean driving record for 3 years or so.

      --
      Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
    20. Re:Mine was similiar by /dev/trash · · Score: 1
      They are quite crappy, yes. I got in a small accident when I was 17. They cut off my parents insurance because of it. I couldn't have caused more than a few K of damage, too. My parents had to sign a contract stating that I would never drive one of "their" cars again (it was my car) for them to have their policy back.

      Well if it was yours you were making the payments on it? And the title was only in your name?

  4. Was it funny, Mr. Submitter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There isn't even a Google or Archive.org mirror of this one...*sniff*
    br? I'm sure it was hilarious, though.

  5. but did anyone actually do anything? by SystematicPsycho · · Score: 0

    it was all talk no action anyway

    --
    Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
    1. Re:but did anyone actually do anything? by keymygrip · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We did something from high school notebooks to fruition. It was a wonderful Mac RPG called Atlas: The Gift of Aramai (Freeverse.com). Some times I would recommend keeping it all to paper. Especially if you and your unexperieced friends want to create something as content intensive as an RPG (go for a clever puzzle or something else that is repeatable.)
      But after five years and 8 people cycled through the team I am proud to say that we did it. And what can I say we got from it? I learned that making games is tough and in the end pretty unrewarding. That is why I am starting a new one :). I had to get new friends to do it though :(.

  6. I forgot by clinko · · Score: 4, Funny

    I also has a dream in which I would get a degree in computer science and make money!!!

    I basically am about to get a degree in potato farming and the Irish Potato Famine just happened.

    1. Re:I forgot by gallen1234 · · Score: 1

      May I recommend grad school? A great way to put the problem off for a couple of years. If you're at a decent size school you may even be able to subsidise it by working as a teaching assistant.

    2. Re:I forgot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      heh yes _that_ will get you a job in this need to actually know what you're doing industry.

      two words: fuck school;

      go out learn the techs they wont teach you in university (php/mysql/c for unix) and start developing some hardcore web services. Then and only then you'll make money.

      We dont need some just out of school i've got a bsci so im holier than thou attidude who cant do the job as well as a 16 yr old who actually has an interest in the job.

      This is not a profession to make an easy know-nothing buck in this isnt 1998. We all wish it was but people are smarter now.

      If you want my advice and you probably dont. Your bsci degree would be better coupled with a mba from a reputable school. Then once you have the understanding of how business works. Come up with a novell invention and patent it/incorporate and heres a though only expand the company when you actually have the money to and not just because some schmo will give you 500k.

      Good luck to you you're gonna need it.

    3. Re:I forgot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, you have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

    4. Re:I forgot by andyast · · Score: 3, Funny

      One bonus of school is the ability to spell and appear intelligent. Go for the degree, it may not help, but it will show employers that you will work hard and that is somthing.

    5. Re:I forgot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The irish potato famine was not an event in which everybody decided they didn't want potatoes anymore, thus starving the farmers. Your analogy sucks.

    6. Re:I forgot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well,when in rome...

      find yourself a nice bottle of irish whiskey.

    7. Re:I forgot by Rexburg · · Score: 1

      And some of us saw it coming and just started grabbing the potatoes with out any of that fancy training. Ah, the joys of real world experience.

      --

      ---------
      Launch all sig
  7. Even worse by papasui · · Score: 4, Funny

    I know a guy that spent all his time making instruction booklets for games that didn't exist. It started getting scarey when he did one with a multi-dick hermaphrodite named 'George' who worked in a cheese factory and your goal was to cultivate a new form of yeast infection from the bacteria used to grow cheese.

  8. Re:Here's that notebook by aed · · Score: 5, Funny

    There's a mirror right here

  9. uh oh. by peatbakke · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've been out of high school for a long time and I still do that on my lunch breaks. And after work. On my coffee breaks. Before lectures. After lectures. While watching TV. Riding the bus. Walking down the street.

    But not in bed. The girlfriend put the kibosh on that one early on.

    1. Re:uh oh. by EnderWiggnz · · Score: 1

      you're girlfriend doesnt want you to design games in bed?

      i pity your sex life.

      --
      ... hi bingo ...
    2. Re:uh oh. by WEFUNK · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Sorry to nitpick, but based on that riveting description of your life I'm guessing that you just forget to put the quotation marks around "girlfriend" (or maybe that should just be implied for Slashdot gaming articles).

      --
      My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
    3. Re:uh oh. by BitHive · · Score: 1

      Of course "she" did, it's hard to write in a notebook with only one hand to hold the pen and the notebook. . .

    4. Re:uh oh. by Spunxer · · Score: 1

      lol come on guys he just wants to let us know he has a girlfriend 40 years after highschool.

    5. Re:uh oh. by traskjd · · Score: 1

      I love how John Carmack posts on here :-)

      j/k :)

  10. now they can make a new game... by MattW · · Score: 2, Funny

    Called "Dodge the Slashdotting 2002", and base it on personal experience.

  11. I cant see the notebook, but by PanBanger · · Score: 4, Funny

    if this was written in 1984 and the game consists of a big white circle being eaten by a big green circle, then I've been ripped off.

    1. Re:I cant see the notebook, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interesting. I had an idea back then that consisted of two big squares shooting smaller, more brightly colored, squares at each other. Never considered the circle angel.

    2. Re:I cant see the notebook, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is the "circle angel" anything like the Credit Angel?

    3. Re:I cant see the notebook, but by sporkboy · · Score: 2, Funny

      hey, a circle! that's my idea

      you know, for kids

      (can't see it either myself)

  12. Re:Here's that notebook by imperator_mundi · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    As usual. Never understimate the power of .\

  13. Server running on a notebook too? by Petronius · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It's slashdotted already!
    Can't wait to see shots of the blueprints of their new server...

    --
    there's no place like ~
  14. Re:Here's that notebook by Delrin · · Score: 1

    haha, now THAT's technology for you!..

  15. Google Cache of the main page by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:7bbg_EjcxcEC: garote.bdmonkeys.net/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

    I can't find the /notebook page though

    1. Re:Google Cache of the main page by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Make it a link, so the /. lamness filter doesn't fuck it up with spaces

      http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:7bbg_EjcxcEC: garote.bdmonkeys.net/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

  16. Hasent Changed.. much by Geldon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Im still in high school... and the only difference is that we sit around with our laptops and one person gets the 3D design, and another person does teh website, and another makes sure that we dont get sued for uninetntionally creating a game too similar to an existing one...

    1. Re:Hasent Changed.. much by blancolioni · · Score: 5, Funny

      Which one of you does the spelling check?

    2. Re:Hasent Changed.. much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

      I don't know where you learned Egnlish, but you need to be tought a thing or to more. The phrase,

      "and another makes sure that we dont get sued for uninetntionally creating"

      is not proper english. The correct saying is:

      "and another makes sure that we doesn't get sued for uninetntionally creating".

    3. Re:Hasent Changed.. much by idontneedanickname · · Score: 1

      Not him

    4. Re:Hasent Changed.. much by nEoN+nOoDlE · · Score: 2

      Which one of you does the spelling check?

      I do... got a porblem with taht?

      --
      Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
    5. Re:Hasent Changed.. much by Requiem · · Score: 1

      em

    6. Re:Hasent Changed.. much by Geldon · · Score: 1

      me fail english? thats unpossible

  17. we did it by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 2, Interesting
    And I was the guy who wrote the music ... I still have the .mid files.

    Well, it was created in 'klik'n'create' which was some sort of scripting language game creation tool, but hey, it was a working side scroller! Not much real programming happenned.

    1. Re:we did it by brain159 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      klik'n'create (and its little brother klik'n'play) grew up to become The Games Factory (very similar to KnP). There's a new nifty-looking 3D one from the same people called Jamagic, which abandons KnP/TGFs "point and drool" pseudo-programming in favour of javascript [pseudo-programming]. Jamagic and TGF are available from clickteam.com

    2. Re:we did it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Jamagic is just a little limited for me.

      I use 3DGameStudio (www.conitec.net). Very neat. Easy to use and powerful.

    3. Re:we did it by hazyshadeofwinter · · Score: 1

      Umm, isn't Javascript Turing-complete? So if it's not "real progamming" enough for you, you could simply:
      1. write a C interpreter in Javascript
      2. ???
      3.:Profit!!!

      Hey, do I get a prize for being the 1 millionth customer to use this meme?

      --
      Click here if you just like to click on shit.
  18. Delusions... by Safiire+Arrowny · · Score: 1

    My delusions of designing video games started a bit earlier with my friends in like grade 5 or so. We'd draw out new levels for existing game franchises ie Mario, etc. We were going to try and make it and send it in to Nintendo and thought it would be magically good enough for our ideas to make it into a real game.

    Anyway I must still be delusional cause I'm starting my 4th year of formal game programming education this year, maybe I'll make a published game yet.

    At any rate this reminded me of just how long I've been trying this game making stuff, Yay ./!

    1. Re:Delusions... by TeknoDragon · · Score: 2

      heh, we had delusions allright... 3-5 DnD freaks, all had computers.

      It started even before highschool, like sometime in middle school.

      Problem is that 3 of the 5 knew basic and 1 of the 5 knew C (I was still learning). So the C guy made a couple dozen games (Starquest? Galaxyquest? it was certainly his best, and had 3-4 different versions, including a 3d prototype during out Junior year).

      These days I'm spending time compiling a huge classic ff-based world and refining the idea of using Java reflection & some of my own code validation schemes to have a programmer's RPG. I.E. your sword is a Java class that must follow certain pre & post condition & statistical rules or it's either rejected or breaks.

    2. Re:Delusions... by Marc2k · · Score: 1

      IBM (i think?) put out something like that called RobotWars, to promote learning Java. You started with a base robot class, and followed certain guidlines to create your own simple AI for the robot. Certainly an RPG like that would be nothing short of amazing.

      --
      --- What
    3. Re:Delusions... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Robocode, see http://alphaworks.ibm.com

      (Can someone with a login repost this, I can't be bothered to go re-register)

    4. Re:Delusions... by skotte · · Score: 2

      this was me .. i'd be all about making new puzzles and trees and things fFor "Below the Root". cool ol' C=64 game :)

    5. Re:Delusions... by GreggBert · · Score: 1

      You mean RoboCode. Info here. Awsome for learning Java "under fire" as it were.

      --


      If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
    6. Re:Delusions... by TeknoDragon · · Score: 2

      http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/robocode

      heard of it... but haven't played with it much.

      the principle is simmilar, but I'm working on a greater range of complex interactions (think final fantasy tactics calculator on crack)

  19. Deader than . . . dead by GlassUser · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's gone. Too many jpegs? No mirror, no google cache, no nada. Just gone.

    1. Re:Deader than . . . dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the ultimate in slashdotting!

    2. Re:Deader than . . . dead by GlassUser · · Score: 1

      a clean kill. And when I checked it, it had 0 posts. That was FAST.

    3. Re:Deader than . . . dead by tx_mgm · · Score: 1

      ya know, if the webmasters were ever inclined to orchestrate a simple DDoS attack, they sure have one hell of a way to do it....
      tho it is a bit annoying trying to access a slashdotted site, it is amazing (and a little funny) that us slashdotters are (AFAIK) completely responsible for websites just dissapearing off of the face of the web.
      probably even more funny if the webmasters of the poor site had no clue why they went from hits per day in the 100's to hundreds of thousands in just a few minutes....heh

      --
      Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
      -Dr. Weird
    4. Re:Deader than . . . dead by Zathrus · · Score: 2

      Not all that funny if you're on the receiving end of the bill... a lot of hosting sites bill based off of bandwidth usage, with flat level caps and then money per bit afterwards.

      So imagine going from a $50/month hosting fee to $15k.

      And it happens, and companies go out of business dealing with it -- if you make $30k/year from this side job and only half of that is profit, you just got your profit for an entire year eaten by a /.-ing. Why bother? Call the company bankrupt (you DID incorporate, right?) and move on.

    5. Re:Deader than . . . dead by kisrael · · Score: 2

      Which is a note to content providers out there...there are several "unlimited traffic" webhosts out there that are still pretty cheap. I don't know how they prevent abuse, but this one is really good and that one ain't bad either.

      Often they have limits on how much storage space you get though, like 50 megs...maybe that helps prevent them running out of pipe.

      --
      SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
    6. Re:Deader than . . . dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And were supposed to care because? If someone is too dumb to prepare for this than that's their problem. Think about it. Your putting out a resource to the entire world that anyone can get to by the simple click of a mouse. If someone gets stuck with a huge bill they should read the fine print with their web host. Only a complete moron would put themselves in a position where they have so much to lose financially by a situation which is completely out of their control. Sorry but I don't feel sorry for someone who doesn't know how to plan.

    7. Re:Deader than . . . dead by saider · · Score: 1



      This is probably on their own machine hanging off of their DSL line. Their provider is probably going to be giving them a call soon.

      --


      Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
  20. Not mine... by magicsquid · · Score: 4, Funny

    And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."

    Hmmm... that doesn't look like my handwriting.

    --


    "Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
    1. Re:Not mine... by ThereIsNoSporkNeo · · Score: 1

      Wait a second! That -is- my handwriting! How the hell did he get that!

      Excuse me, I'm going to just grab my interrogation bat and head over to his place.

      --
      With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
    2. Re:Not mine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey! That's my interrogation bat, give it back!

  21. prespective... by No+Such+Agency · · Score: 3, Funny

    Then, he was weird. Now, he's probably considered a cutting edge avant-garde artist, hanging out at all the cool parties and dating a girl who looks like Laura Prepon. Or, he's still living in his parents' basement. At least he found a way to survive high school.

    --
    Freedom: "I won't!"
    1. Re:prespective... by papasui · · Score: 3, Funny

      last I heard he was gay and ran away to join some cult.

    2. Re:prespective... by zenyu · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oh so he became an artist then?

    3. Re:prespective... by tabby · · Score: 1

      why isn't this .jpg slashdotted yet?

      --
      I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
  22. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by psychofox · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you use IE don't even think about clicking on the above link. I just did and about 64 windows opened and my machine hung. I just lost some work. Thanks.

  23. We didn't have time to make games by yeoua · · Score: 5, Funny

    We were too busy fending off those big goons who tried to take our lunch money.

    1. Re:We didn't have time to make games by brad.hill · · Score: 3, Funny
      Well, if it makes you feel any better, garote is a friend of mine (I contributed to those notebook pages on other subjects, and holy crap if I ever thought as many folks as read /. would ever be looking at them!) and we had to endure quite a bit torment and harassment by the goons.


      A decade later, we're now all quite successful and happy in our lives. In contrast, while home visiting the 'rents a few years ago, I caught a story on the local news about one of the worst bullies we had to deal with. He got his kicks throwing fist-sized rocks at us in high school. He has just been convicted of attacking a randomly chosen homeless man with a bat, just for fun. They said they were postponing his sentencing hearing pending tests to see if he had brain damage. Nothing any of us couldn't have told everybody years before. . .its' just sad somebody had to really get hurt before anything was done.

    2. Re:We didn't have time to make games by unicron · · Score: 2

      I had a health teacher in junior high that I, along with every other guy in the room, just knew was a sexual predator. Not violently so, but it was pretty obvious the guy was sleeping with a student or 2. This is junior high, mind you, so these girls were(thinking..) 12-14 years of age or so.

      So one day I'm watching the news, and I see this guy has been arrested for statchatory(sp?) rape. I move to the phone so fast I created a paradox in my living room. All of my friends lines are busy, for at least 20 minutes, maybe 10-15 people. Finally I get through to one. "Oh SHIT! Did you hear about Mr. C'Debaca? Bastard is in jail, yo!" "Hell yeah I heard, my phone hasn't stopped ringing in 20 minutes!"

      From that point on, if I suspected that of any other teachers(cough, Mr. Eberhardt, cough), I mor or less assumed it to be true.

      --
      Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
  24. Remember when? High school? by dmorin · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The concept still exists. It's called Sourceforge.

    "Hey, I have an idea, but I have no skills, so I'm looking for people to do all the work and I just want all the credit! What, no takers? Open source sucks!"

  25. Even better by Salad+Shooter · · Score: 0

    My friend got a Commodore sx64 for Christmas ('83) and he used to bring that to school. yeah, it was like 'Revenge of The Nerds' but it was fun.

    We were making a game (ah sprites) called Mr. Mercenary were you sniped people at a carnival.

  26. Who's got 100 half-finished games? by marko123 · · Score: 1

    I wrote 20% of heaps of games. An early one was a text-mode based game on the Atari 800 with remapped character graphics, collision detection, etc... then I started playing a great new ground-breaking game and forgot all about it...

    Rinse, lather, repeat for my entire life...

    --
    http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
    1. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by Rary · · Score: 1
      I started writing 20% of games in the early 80's, on my VIC-20 and later my Commodore 64. Sometimes I didn't even have a game idea, I'd just start writing the program, setting up standard variables like SC (for score) and HS (for high score), and creating the opening screen that let you select to start the game. I never started by putting ideas on paper, I always dove right into code. I'd start with:

      10 POKE 53280,0:POKE 53281,0

      to turn the screen black. Then I'd go, "now what?".

      Sadly, I'm still writing 20% games to this day. My latest attempt, however, is the first one that is actually starting on paper. Strangely, at 30 years of age, I'm still under the delusion that I'll actually finish this one.

      I'll never learn.

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

    2. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by gazbo · · Score: 1
      You manually typed in all of the POKE commands? You realise you could have typed 50% quicker by writing a wrapper that cycled through an array of memory/value pairs?

      Guess you didn't...

    3. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by thasmudyan · · Score: 1

      Yeah right, me too. I think there's a lot of people like us out there. With most projects the time comes when the idea of a new project become much more interesting than the stuff you are currently working on! I would just love to complete SOMETHING once in a while...

    4. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by marko123 · · Score: 1

      A good idea is to go in those 24/48 hour game competitions. They make you finish something.

      Disclaimer: I went in my last one to learn C++ (old Delphi programmer), so I didn't get too far :)

      http://ludumdare.com/

      --
      http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
    5. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      those are C64 pokes for setting background/foreground colors. Somehow I don't think he was poking an entire machine language program into memory from basic. He was just coding basic.

    6. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ahh, that takes me back. I can't believe that after almost 20 years I still remember that 53280 and 53281 are the memory addresses for screen and boarder colors. Scary!!!!

    7. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by mrseigen · · Score: 1

      Aaargh, yes. I wish I had the time to take all the hypertalk 'games' that I built (sometimes to around 75%! well, only one), put them in a real language, and finish them.

    8. Re:Who's got 100 half-finished games? by Rary · · Score: 1
      A wrapper to cycle through 2 POKE commands to set the background/border colors? That would be faster? I think not!

      No, seriously, I wasn't writing ML code. I never got around to learning that. I always just dabbled in BASIC. BASIC was fun. ML was work. Of course, today, I prefer languages that are more "work". I'd choose C++ over some crap like Visual BASIC anyday, even with the nostalgia factor of working with a language that still has all those same functions I used to use on my C-64 (if only you could POKE and PEEK, though! Man, that would make me smile).

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

  27. Jeez by BigJimSlade · · Score: 5, Funny

    People, the Slashdot effect is getting out of hand. We've now slashdotted a spiral-bound notebook? Someone must put an end to this madness!

    1. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Spiral-bound? Please. This is the kind of important shit that goes into a marble notebook.

    2. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Marble... BAH! This kind of importance requires a hardbound notebook!

    3. Re:Jeez by ThereIsNoSporkNeo · · Score: 1

      Hardbound!... BAH. This kind of important stuff has to be magically imprinted into the TOME OF INFINITE KNOWLEDGE so that future generations can look upon it in wonder and say:
      "What a crappy idea. I'm glad it never made it to production"

      --
      With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
  28. Hosted by The Braindead Monkeys by ThogScully · · Score: 1
    Hosted by The Braindead Monkeys

    I got this and none of the seemingly endless number of JPGs that made up the rest of the page. I'd say this much is apparent from the page design and willingness to submit to the Slashdot Effect.

    -N

    --
    I've nothing to say here...
    1. Re:Hosted by The Braindead Monkeys by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your sig doesn't consider the people who understand binary 2's-compliment...

    2. Re:Hosted by The Braindead Monkeys by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      shut up, mac user! :)

      True binary is 1 and 0!

      --
      -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
  29. Curious... this discussion by ites · · Score: 1

    Teenagers, practising their skills, consider their 'work' worthy of historical note. Arrogance? Youth? Ites says: easy to make drawings in the sand. Ideas are cheap. Finish the job and you will deserve to be remembered.

    --
    Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
    1. Re:Curious... this discussion by GutBomb · · Score: 2

      it is not the work or the content of the notebook that is noteworthy here. it is the whole concept of what they are doing. It's something all of us have done in the past. also notice the topic it is under? it's not under the "take this seriously or die" topic, now is it?

    2. Re:Curious... this discussion by hype7 · · Score: 1
      Teenagers, practising their skills, consider their 'work' worthy of historical note. Arrogance? Youth? Ites says: easy to make drawings in the sand. Ideas are cheap. Finish the job and you will deserve to be remembered.


      true, in a way - and at the same time, maybe not. A lot of people have had brilliant ideas, and then had others pick up the work and carry it on.

      we need all kinds of people - not just people that do it, but people that dream it - to forward the race. Just because the kids didn't have the time or resources to put it into practice, doesn't mean it's not a valuable contribution.

      Who knows when some wacky idea will get picked up and take off.

      -- james
    3. Re:Curious... this discussion by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 1

      Oh, come on...this is all about the nostalgy. You know remembering when times were still good, when we were going to make tons of money because we wrote a hit game. It changes a bit from being unemployed or being a sad Corporate Troll in a gray office complex.
      It's not much difference from a few gray-haired / bald old men remembering when the river was still clean and they'd fish enourmous fish. It's important to noone, but themselves.

    4. Re:Curious... this discussion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      :start
      Einstein didn't finish his.
      Bertrand Rusell didn't finish his.
      Neitzsche didn't finish his.
      Immanuel Kant didn't finish his.
      Sartre didn't finish his.
      Who are you?
      goto start

  30. Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by glh · · Score: 3, Offtopic

    I think slashdot could help everyone out by doing the following.

    1. Any time an article is submitted that refers to a non-news site (such as the one in this story), slashdot should automatically pull a copy of the page/story and put it somewhere in a temporary cache. The story would automatically generate the "slashdot cache" link and content when the article is posted.

    2. The temporary cache that these web pages are pulled into only exist for the stories that are on the front page (or perhaps a day). After that specified time, the cache is flushed.

    This code would be VERY simple to write. All it is is a simple screen scrape! A list of sites to not cache (such as yahoo news, cnn, etc.) could be kept in a simple text file.

    Despite copyright laws, I think people that have sites that can't handle a slashdot load would prefer a copy of their content on slashdot as opposed to an effective DDOS. Both readers and site owners would be MUCH HAPPIER.

    Just my 2c. PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! IT IS VERY ANNOYING, ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS.

    1. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by glh · · Score: 3, Funny

      You could even call it something cool, like "slash cache"..

    2. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by ptomblin · · Score: 2

      And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue (ok, I'm showing my age there - do you kiddies remember when banner ads were going to make money?) or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?

      I still get a pang of regret every time I see a hit in my Apache logs for somebody looking for that picture of a computer case made out of a beer box that I posted to Slashdot about 3 years ago. Why did I remove that picture?

      --
      The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
    3. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by FrenZon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      See, the weird thing here is that the text referring to the person who submitted this article ('anonymous reader') hass a link to the server that this notebook sits on - could it be that in self-promotion, they killed their own machine?

      As a sysadmin, is there any information anywhere on what sort of machine/connection can handle a slashdot load? I've seen hitcounters of slashdotted sites, and the hits weren't as bad as I was expecting, is it really just that slashdotted servers are 486s in someone's shed?

    4. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Anonymous+Cowtard · · Score: 1
      The sad thing is that you see a comment like this every time a Slashdotting happens to a small site. It'll get modded up to 5 but the pleas still fall on deaf ears around here. Quite a shame, really as it's such a good idea.

      So much of this site is based on the discussion. Hard to dscuss a site that has just been wiped of the face of the Earth for the next day or so.

    5. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by loconet · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hey, Thats a good idea. Why dont you submit it as a Features Request for slash code?

      --
      [alk]
    6. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by redink1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A couple of other things that should be done in addition to your ideas. 1) Only link to the 'Slash Cache' if the site is down. Check every 10 minutes to see if the site is down, and if it is display the handly Slash Cache link. If the site is reachable again, then remove the link. This solves the problem of lost banner revenue, as the site can't get banner revenue if it is dead. 2) I believe there is something in the robots.txt file (or some other config file) that Google searches for that will tell it not to cache pages. Slashdot could look for the same thing, and see if caching is allowed. This should bypass any copyright problems.

    7. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then they could just put an entry for "SlashCache" in their robots.txt?

    8. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by cuyler · · Score: 1

      What if the main link in the story went to the web server. If it could handle the load then it'd get all the hits.

      Then, under the "Read more" on the Slashdot story a link to the SlashCache version would be available in case the server was slashdotted. Naturally most people (95%?) would go to the first link first.

      This would allow the client to still get their banner funds and for the rest of us who aren't lucky enough to be among the first five slashdotters to read the story.

    9. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by thasmudyan · · Score: 1

      And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue .... or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?

      Hm, valid point. Here is another one: quite many people actually have to PAY for their website's traffic if it exceeds certain limits (especially bad for private hobbyist's sites)!!! Also there is of course bound to be Copyright Trouble.

      So I propose the following addition to glh's suggestion: let the Slashdot editor contact the website's owner and ASK "hey dude, we're going to blast your site to nirvana so do you want us to cache it?" In my experience it isn't that difficult to make contact with a website's owner, so it should be possible to use caching in a legally safe manner. Most site owners would welcome this feature.

    10. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Phil+John · · Score: 1

      Got another site for the do_not_cache.txt file... www.riaa.org ;o)

      --
      I am NaN
    11. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by The+Dev · · Score: 4, Funny

      Of course they could just host the images on
      Geekshelf and not worry about it :)

    12. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by the+bluebrain · · Score: 1

      [...] slashdot should automatically pull a copy of the page/story and put it somewhere in a temporary cache [...]
      PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! IT IS VERY ANNOYING, ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS


      (re. the slashcode)

      Hmph. I am kept from submitting comments like this by cringing at the thought of someone replying "It's open source. Dude - go ahead. Don't let *us* stop you." - and I can't type when I cringe.
      Seriously though - I have more ideas than I have 1337 5ki11z, and I don't think that those with the skills have fewer ideas than myself.

      Plus - hey ... wouldn't this lead to /. being /.-ed? :)

      --
      yes, we have no bananas
    13. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by ivrcti · · Score: 1

      I love your sig. It's my quote for the day!

    14. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One of the usual replies to this, is that website owners sould be abel to update their site and have the changes reflected to the slashdot crowd. Therefor TTL in the cache could be set very low. There is a big difference between getting 30 hit every 1 sec and getting 1 hit per 30 sec performancewice, but a page that is 30 seconds old should be fresh enough.

    15. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by mhesseltine · · Score: 1

      Or, how about, if you have an account then you have a journal. While you can't necessarily put the images from the page there, you could copy and paste the article text into your journal.

      This accomplishes 2 things. First, since it's not the /. editors who are caching the content, they can stay away from copyright claims that they say are a problem with caching. Also, you can reduce the karma whore effect of everyone and their grandpa getting +5 informative for posting the text of the article.

      --
      Overrated / Underrated : Moderation :: Anonymous Coward : Posting
    16. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Mark+Hood · · Score: 2

      So leave the URLs with 'ad' in them, or pointing to 'doubleclick' as they are...

      If Webwasher, Omniweb et al can spot an Ad, surely it's not beyond the /. editors? :)

      --
      Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
    17. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by glh · · Score: 2

      Thanks, good idea. I went ahead and submitted it w/ a little elaboration. We'll see where it goes!

    18. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by alpha264 · · Score: 1

      The problem is, who hosts this content? Slashdot? Do you know why the slashdot effect doesn't affect slashdot itself? Because slashdot, for the most part, hosts only text.

    19. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by brain159 · · Score: 2

      IMHO, "cachedot" would be far better :o)

    20. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by parkrrrr · · Score: 1
      Seriously though - I have more ideas than I have 1337 5ki11z, and I don't think that those with the skills have fewer ideas than myself.
      And this branch of the thread is dragged, kicking and screaming, back on-topic.
    21. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Gaijin42 · · Score: 2

      Actually, since banner ads are usually just links to 3rd party sites, if we scraped the html, the link would still be there, and would still have the correct site ID in the url, so the guy would still get his revenue.

    22. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by Xerithane · · Score: 2

      As a sysadmin, is there any information anywhere on what sort of machine/connection can handle a slashdot load? I've seen hitcounters of slashdotted sites, and the hits weren't as bad as I was expecting, is it really just that slashdotted servers are 486s in someone's shed?

      My goal is to get my server slashdotted so I can monitor and tweak it over the time period to see how it handles the load. Lucky sods...

      --
      Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
    23. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by kasparov · · Score: 2

      Or perhaps you should have read the FAQ instead.

      --
      There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
    24. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by BardicStorm · · Score: 1

      However, in the FAQ they're not saying it shouldn't be done, merely that it should be thought through extremely well before implementation.

      I think someone should post the idea to "Ask Slashdot" with a list of all the potential problems and see if a few hundred geeks can't figure it out once and for all.

    25. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by jsse · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The problem is that this problem only exists in http://www.slashdot.org and no where else with the same code base. This new addition would be pretty useless for others.

      (I always find it amazing a high-hit-rate site as such could not make profit. Well, nevermind...)

    26. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by glh · · Score: 1

      Just because it isn't in the FAQ doesn't mean it isn't worth thinking about again (afterall, that was written over 2 years ago).

      There are two types of people. Those who live by the rules, and those who want to change the rules. I'm the latter :) I think there is a solution, and I don't think it would be as difficult as it seems.

    27. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by totallygeek · · Score: 2

      As a sysadmin, is there any information anywhere on what sort of machine/connection can handle a slashdot load?


      Well, I had the Slashdot Effect hit me. My problem was not machine speed (well, yeah, it was), but more the bandwidth. I had a 4 meg GIF file on a webserver over a T-1 connection to AT&T. This file sat on a Pentium II with 96 MB RAM. This machine also runs many other functions, including Spam Assassin and mail for about 2,000 users. Also, my main website runs Post Nuke and so I got bandwidth Slashdotted because I had 30,000 requests for a 4 MB file by noon of day one. That is over 100 gigabytes to transfer, and a single T-1 can only handle 17 gigabytes per day! I replaced the image with a smaller images (5K), but the number of requests made the webserver go haywire. Before it ran a load average of maybe 0.70 fulfilling all its requests, but when I cut to the smaller size GIF and more requests came in, the load average went to more than 100.00!


      The end result was three days of monitoring, firewalling, changing GIFs, etc. My main website (running Post Nuke) got more traffic that day than any other in its history. More than 3,000 requests came day one just from the link with my name. I feel that it is still majorly responsible for the traffic I get, and I still get many links to the 4 MB GIF file.


      On another note, I had submitted a story once before that did not point to me, but the link from my name generated more than 10,000 hits in that month.


      Could my webserver stand up to Slashdot? If I had more memory -- yes! However, the bandwidth was the problem. It is a marriage of the two bottlenecks that allows systems to beat the effect. If I had my site distributed across several Internet connections and many different, powerful systems it would have been no problem -- just a heavy day.

    28. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by adadun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The reason why sites are brought down because of the slashdot effect is probably a combination of two things: (1) large pictures on the web page (like in this case) and (2) lots of server side scripting. In the former case the server bandwidth is the bottleneck, whereas in the latter case the server runs out of CPU cycles and RAM.

      I have been slashdotted twice myself (Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64 and VNC Server for Toasters and Light-Switches). In both cases the web server running on the Commodore 64 was really slow because of the load, whereas the "regular" web server hosting the description pages behaved differently in the two cases. The first time there were a number of pictures on the linked page, and the web server was sluggish because of the load. The other time the web page only consisted of a single HTML text page with a single picture and the load on the web server was hardly noticeable.

      The web server on the first occation was a dual CPU PC with 2 GB RAM and for the second occation the server was a single CPU PC with 256 MB RAM. The first web server also hosts some hundred domains, whereas the second only hosts one. The Commodore 64 has 64kB RAM and runs at 1 MHz, but only hosted one domain.

      To sum up: a web server running on a Commodore 64 is a little too slow to be able to deliver pages in full speed during a slashdotting, whereas a PC can handle it, given that the web page consists mostly of text and doesn't have too many heavy scripts.

    29. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by _xeno_ · · Score: 2
      I've seen two Slashdottings locally - one was to a mirror of some KDE screenshots (which is kinda funny, since I'm a GNOME user :)), and the other was the Linux Powered Christmas Tree.

      Both were very small pages with relatively small downloads, and both survived the Slashdot effect relatively well. However, this is probably because both were behind an OC-48 connection to the Internet...

      I don't know about the Christmas tree's load, but it was a P100 with 64MB RAM, and it surivived the load fairly well. (I think - it appears that everybody was able to access the tree and view it and several people were able to bitch about it "not really being a Linux powered Christmas tree" by either contesting it being a Christmas tree or by contesting it being "Linux powered" - but now is not the time or place to argue that. However, if posters could come to conclusions about that, then they probably could view the site.)

      The bottom line is that most servers, assuming they aren't doing some serious server side scripting, can safely handle the Slashdot effect without melting down. The Slashdot Effect is almost always a bandwidth issue and can easily be compared with a DDOS attack - massive incoming requests and outgoing answers filling the available bandwidth. Except that in the case of a Slashdotting, the requests are all valid and are attempting to access the resource, and not just run it off the net.

      And while the caching suggestion to help the Slashdot Effect has been given many, many times - enough to appear in the FAQ - the reality is that the editors should actually consider implementing it instead of just dismissing it. I still believe that the right thing to do is to contact the site authors and determine whether or not the site can handle the load. The stories are staggered anyway; seriously, this story could have safely waited a month or longer to come to a mutual agreement with the site operator about how to handle the load.

      Six hours is nothing if it means the site won't get taken off the net due to excessive bandwidth usage.

      In relation to the KDE links, I still have my server logs of the connections and would at some point like to try and give a better view of the Slashdot effect from the side of a server. For simple text articles, it's not that bad. For movies and large images, on the other hand, I'd imagine it could be a lot harsher. If anyone's interested, I could release the logs minus the IP information. Due to the state of flux my e-mail is currently in, either reply via Slashdot or simply send via Sourceforge - I'll find it :)

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
    30. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by thomas.galvin · · Score: 1

      And defeat the purpose of having a slashcache at all...

    31. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by bonzoesc · · Score: 2, Informative
      Just because it isn't in the FAQ doesn't mean it isn't worth thinking about again
      No, you shouldn't worry about this shit because EVERY GODDAMN TIME SOMEBODY POSTS A FUCKING LINK THAT GETS SLUGGISH IN THE LEAST (actual or percieved), SOME FUCKING MONGOLIDS NEED TO CHANT THEIR RECURRING CRY OF "SLASHCACHE CACHEDOT RAH RAH RAH."

      Goddamn taco-raping Jesus H. Christ jumping up and down on a motherfucking pogo stick. LURK BEFORE YOU POST.

    32. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by MuMart · · Score: 1

      Yeah! You could call it the Cachedot ;)

    33. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by TDO · · Score: 1

      The problem with that, is that will cost slashdot a lot more bandwidth, and nobody is buying subscriptions anyway. IMO we need a distributated solution to solve a distributated problem. Say there were a browser plugin that added a special URI like sdtp://.... this plugin would search for an archive on some P2P network, and if none existed it would attempt to go to the site (creating an archive and sharing it). Then slashdot could save a setting where your URI's would be the caching ones or not.

      --

      ---
      "To know recursion, you must first know recursion."
    34. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by isorox · · Score: 2

      My bank used to love me every month when I walked in with a cheque for ~ $150 (Cost £5 just to cash them). Not much, but not bad for a part time site by a 15 yearold with front page adverts. This was at the time when $4 or $5 cpm wasnt unusual.

    35. Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT by the+bluebrain · · Score: 1

      And this branch of the thread is dragged, kicking and screaming, back on-topic.


      Unintentional side-effect :)

      Okay ... I never had a notebook. I still have a couple of loose leafs with sprites for the C-64 though ... from the time before a) sprite-editors, and b) my trusty 1541 5 1/4' disk drive.
      I remember once not taking part in a contest, where the task was to write a useful program in C-64 BASIC in thirteen instructions or less (or some such inanity). I had a killer submission - a sort of 'roids game - which was so good I spent the whole time playing it instead of submitting it. Well, that's my excuse anyway. I'm sure I still have a disk somewhere, with half an inch of dust on it.

      Um ... so that was a "me2", without the benefit of having read the article even, because it was /.-ed.

      --
      yes, we have no bananas
  31. hmm slashdotted once again, how about my site? by linuxislandsucks · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Hmm slashdotted once again! Curses!

    How about my site?

    --
    Don't Tread on OpenSource
  32. Re:Here's that notebook by Anarchofascist · · Score: 2

    You are an evil, evil little man.

    --
    Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
  33. DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK! ITS A POP-UP TRAP! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    This jack ass child has it setup to crash IE with hords of pop-up windows.

  34. Re:Here's that notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please hit this link like a million times and crash the mirror!

  35. Hedgehogger by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I beat Sega to Sonic the Hedgehog by about two years. The game was called Hedgehogger, he was brown (not blue) and the big boss was an Owl.

  36. Remember when... by artemis67 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Remember when you were a kid and you had this cool idea for a video game, so you put it up on a website, but some big bully of a site came along, pushed you down in the mud, slashdotted your site and stole your lunch money?

    1. Re:Remember when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, 'cause I'm older than 14.

    2. Re:Remember when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah..

      Too bad most people aren't considered mature until, you know, their voice breaks and they grow some hair on their balls.

      Come back with your snide, condescending remarks in a few years, sonny.

    3. Re:Remember when... by Perky_Goth · · Score: 1

      Remember when forums where small enough that you thought of a joke and no-one had said it?

      *sigh*

  37. The Way Things Are Done Now by chromentis · · Score: 1

    I just graduated, but my notebook is scattered within icq logs and irc logs. Didn't read the article... but I'm sure its the same stuff as described.

  38. memories by bjtuna · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Remember those high-school lunchtimes, back in the day, when you and your computer-nerd friends would hang out by the Krunch Korral


    My high school lunchtimes were either spent eating lunch, joking around with friends, doing homework or going off-campus to smoke pot with friends. Incidentally, none of my friends were computer nerds; I was pretty much the only computer nerd in my class (it was a small school, about 100 people per class). I never let computers define me... it was a hobby. Had I let my life revolve around computer (games|systems|hacking|programming), I probably would have found I had nothing in common with anyone at my school.


    On the other hand, I think it would have been cool to have a couple geek friends in high school.


    This was obviously a little off-topic, but I have tons of karma and that quip from the story topic made me think about it.

    1. Re:memories by cuyler · · Score: 1

      > (it was a small school, about 100 people per class)

      How big were the classes of a normal size school? Here in Ontario there was a big fuss when class sizes ballooned up to an average of 37.

    2. Re:memories by TXH · · Score: 1

      I'm guessing he meant class as in grade level, not the actual classroom.

    3. Re:memories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He means class in the "grade" sense. So 100 freshmen, 100 sophomores, etc... You, "Class of '94".

    4. Re:memories by gnalre · · Score: 1

      Or maybe the pot hat a bigger effect than he thought? 30 real people and 70 which kept melting whenever he tried to talk to them

      --
      Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
    5. Re:memories by bjtuna · · Score: 1

      Or maybe the pot hat a bigger effect than he thought? 30 real people and 70 which kept melting whenever he tried to talk to them

      heh, I smoked POT, not angel dust.

    6. Re:memories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then yer not a nerd. Git yer off this cottin pickin site ye hear? Now skit before we yall invoke the knights who say "Nih!" :)

    7. Re:memories by SCHecklerX · · Score: 2

      He probably meant in his graduating class, not per classroom. 100 is small. I think my graduating class was like 108.

    8. Re:memories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      are you retarded or have you just been brainwashed by america's WoD, either way we have another ingorant motherfucker

    9. Re:memories by traskjd · · Score: 1

      " I never let computers define me... it was a hobby."

      Keep telling ya self that Bill...oh wait the nickname says bjtuna...:-) j/k

    10. Re:memories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, that's rather small.

      Mine is about 500.

    11. Re:memories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      mine was 52

  39. whats the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    let's crush his server....now!!! this slashdotting has to stop - it makes you guys look really lame.

  40. Re: Cor, I did that too!! by Te1waz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A mate and myself talked about writing a couple of really cool games (well, we thought they were cool at the time).

    One wouldn't have sold at all well outside Northern Ireland as nobody would understand the humour.

    The other was based on the actions of an estranged young man around the time(1989) by the name of Michael. I can't remember the details of the incident but he decided to take pot shots at people in his town then turned his rifle on himself. We were going to call it Michaels Shoot-out Challenge.

    Good job we didn't go through with it, we'd have been sued to b*ggery...

    --
    From my Autobiography - "Lifestyles of the Sad and Desperate"...
  41. Been there, done that by CarlFairhurst · · Score: 1

    I remember doing exactly the same thing when I was in my early teens, although I did write quite a bit. I even had a response from one company that they were interested just before they vanished from existance.
    At one point my friend and I managed to get a really cool ice hockey game written and ported to both a ZX Spectrum and C64, but both of us couldn't draw so we were waiting for some other guy to do the graphics he'd promised he'd do so we could finish.... that was over 15 years ago and we're still waiting!
    It looks like things are in a similar state now, except with the Internet you are able to have a potential audiance of millions, not just a handful of friends in the playground. But it looks like the same situation of programmers not having that artistic connection to give their results the final polish they need to get them into the mainstream.
    When I moved back from the States to England a few years ago I did look into getting a developers job at a few game houses, but wife became pregnant and all of a sudden a higher salary and (slightly moe) regular working hours became more important......

  42. Hangman! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Back in the high school days, I and my friend spend hours writing the popular Hangman, with huge hopes distributing it! It never went further than our home computers, but it did get away by using it as a computer science project.

  43. Errr no... by MosesJones · · Score: 3, Funny

    Am I the only one here who wondered more about what party to go to at the weekend and chatting up the girls ? And going to practice explicitly because it seemed to make you more attractive to women. Was I strange that as a 14 year old I was obsessed by breasts ?

    Damn didn't realise I should have been worrying about other things :-)

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
    1. Re:Errr no... by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 1

      Nope.... But the majority of slashdot readers weren't able to do what you did: because just showing our pimple-covered face was enough to scare away even the ugliest girls. So we just found or consolation into computers
      Well, I speak for myself of course.

    2. Re:Errr no... by The+Dobber · · Score: 1

      Most teen-inspired computer game-dreams dealt specifically with the female breast.

    3. Re:Errr no... by 68k+geek · · Score: 1

      man you're so weird...

    4. Re:Errr no... by trotski · · Score: 1

      I was fascinated with brests... more than computers. But then the computer was always there whereas the brests never were. WAAAAAAH!

      --

      "Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
  44. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by Eagle7 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Teaches you something about using IE, eh?

    --
    _sig_ is away
  45. Yep, we did that... by RobinH · · Score: 2

    Only we were going to make one of those uber special graphics demos that ran in 386 Protected Mode! oooooh, aaaah!

    My friend who did the music was the only one with talent, so he eventually realized the rest of us weren't going to be mastering vector based 3D graphics engines in the middle of grade 11. However, I did end up learning how to write an assembly library and link it into a QuickBASIC program... that's something!

    --
    "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
    1. Re:Yep, we did that... by SCHecklerX · · Score: 2
      Mastering 3d vector based engines isn't the problem. Making them run fast enough on a 386..ahh..that was difficult.

      Oddly enough, I didn't make the connection between linear algebra and 3d graphics until I had a spaceflight dynamics course in college...then it hit me...this satellite equation stuff is exactly what I could use to do 3d graphics on the pc...Cool! :)

  46. Nintendo Power sponsored a create-a-game... by NixterAg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Nintendo Power sponsored a contest around 12 or so years ago challenging its readers to come up with spiffy game concepts and submit them. They got some pretty incredible submissions that were incredibly detailed and highly original. The winner was a neat design by budding 14 year old artist Jeffrey Scott Campbell, who I believe went on to a career as a comic book artist. Some dedicated Nintendo junkie out there might still have the issue in question to verify.

    1. Re:Nintendo Power sponsored a create-a-game... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah, the days when kids were naive enough to write ideas for mags so that multinationals could nick them and turn them into games..

    2. Re:Nintendo Power sponsored a create-a-game... by psychotic_venom · · Score: 1

      I actually have that issue. I remember wanting to do that SO bad. I'll have to fish through and find it.

    3. Re:Nintendo Power sponsored a create-a-game... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Google Cache about the article...
      http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:50RZc1ZrUo4C: www.classicgaming.com/thewarpzone/lockarm.html+%22 Jeffrey+Scott+Campbell%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
      oh yah...BTW...Jeffrey Scott Campbell went on to create a little book called GEN 13...! Hello!?

    4. Re:Nintendo Power sponsored a create-a-game... by wuHoncho · · Score: 1

      And, apparently, he's actually got a real game out there based on his recent comic book work, Danger Girl

      Ok, so it's not exactly Lockarm.

      I wonder whatever became of that game. Does anybody know? I tried doing a search for it and the only relevant links I got were broken.

      --


      Just another freak in the freak kingdom.
  47. Teenagers suck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All they do is whine about open source when they could be out making money.

  48. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by Anonymous+Cowtard · · Score: 1

    Yeah... that there are a bunch of petty little people out there who care far to much about what fucking browser people use. Get a life people.

  49. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    > I just did and about 64 windows opened and my machine hung.

    "Slashdot Effect II: The server strikes back"?

  50. The great game notebook... by ivrcti · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now my 14 year old son has one. Hell, he may end up like me. Jeez.. I better talk to that kid!

    1. Re:The great game notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah - if you play your cards right you could help him make the game....

    2. Re:The great game notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      i made my own game.

      i called it "JIZZ".

      your mom was in it.

      she stuck her face into the goatse man.

      goal of game was remove your mom's face
      ...without the goatse man release his LOAD.

      insert coin now!

    3. Re:The great game notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Shit, man, I think that's the greatest work of literature in the history of humanity. It's going to be the new ALL YOUR BASE...

      GOATS: Goal of game... is to remove your mom's face!
      Captain: Goatseman, RELEASE YOUR LOAD!

      Oh man, I have to change my pants---I think I just released my LOAD.

  51. Here's a kid that followed through by gregor-e · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My buddy's kid is still in High School. He not only had these same dreams - he actually sat down with his buddy and hacked out about 50K lines of C++ to produce a playable 3D shooter. From scratch, no less. (Krikes - and I thought the 1000 line poker game I wrote in High School was somethin...)

    1. Re:Here's a kid that followed through by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would hire a kid like that in a nanosecond - for at least double the gong burger-flipping rate.

      Have him send an email to jamie6437AThotmailDOTcom, if he's interested in cranking out code for money.

    2. Re:Here's a kid that followed through by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Too bad it's written for Windows w/ fucking DirectX. Yippee.

  52. Re:Here's that notebook by ivrcti · · Score: 1

    Feed your sense of humor. It's dying a horrible, painful death!

  53. bleh by Journyman · · Score: 1

    well when i was in grade 6 we did somthing like that sept it was creating a virus and taking over the world. I just wanna see the bloody page

  54. Re:Here's that notebook by n-baxley · · Score: 1

    Okay, you got me. That was funny!

  55. Re: Cor, I did that too!! by Captain+Pedantic · · Score: 1
    --

    None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
  56. Still have a Notebook by changos · · Score: 2, Funny

    I keep a notebook with all the cool toys I'm going to get when I graduate from the university. I made my perfect pc, my ultimate car stereo, and pimp home theater. Problem is, since I'm graduating in Computer Science, they'll be on paper for a while.

    1. Re:Still have a Notebook by nochops · · Score: 1

      No, the real problem is that by the time you graduate and have enough money to buy all those toys, all the stuff on your list will be obsolete, especially high-tech stuff.

      I gave up list making a long time ago.

      --
      "A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
  57. Wolfedit, Wolf3d by danitor · · Score: 1

    Anybody here remember Wolfedit, the graphical editor for Wolfenstein 3d? A friend of mine and I remade the entire game into "JOckenstein 3d" using only wolfedit and a 286, arming the enemies with white baseball caps, baseball bats and tennis rackets. Bosses got football helmets and whistles. The best part though, were the "swooshtikas", made from four Nike swooshes. ahh the angst of it all danitor

    1. Re:Wolfedit, Wolf3d by mborland · · Score: 1

      Heh, old WolfEdit. I used the mac version, redid the four-level computing center at college for Wolfenstein, and it worked really well. I still play that mod from time to time.

  58. Re:Slash Cache? too costly... by djtack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This code would be VERY simple to write.

    It sounds like you're assuming the problem is technical. I think it is not. Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over. (Rob says very few people read comments. So instead of loading one front page, the readers now load one front page plus four cached articles. Bandwidth consumption has just pentupled!)

    The other issue here, obviously, is copyright infringement. Sure, you and I know that it's benign, even helpful to the site creator, but not everyone is going to see it that way. I can't imagine the slashdot editors want to deal with the legal headaches that could arise here.

    I have an idea, though... maybe Google would be willing to set up a "streamlined" URL submission page for "trusted" submitters - I bet quite a few Google employees read slashdot. It would allow the trusted users to submit URL's that would be immediately cached and indexed, instead of the usual several week lag time. Google can afford the bandwidth, and their cache is already a generally accepted part of the net landscape. Of course, this doesn't help with image-intensive pages, but those stories are usually lame anyway (woahhhh, dude, check out that case mod! it's got a big hole chopped in the side and it's filled with strawberry Jell-O.)

  59. Re:A good suggestion, except... by renehollan · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ... for all the messy copyright issues it raises. Asking a site that's about to be slashdotted if it wants to be cached would be a bit of a pain, and might delay reporting the story if no response was forthcomming. I think the Slashdot FAQ answers these and other related questions.

    That said, it would be very nice if there was some standard machine readable mechanism to indicate, "yes, you may cache this to avoid slashdotting this site" that the site could serve. Of course, then it gets complex: the caching parameters have to be specified, you ight want allow/deny lists for cachers, etc. Finally, if someone does cache such a site, they'd want to have legal proof that permission was granted, and that brings us to the use of PKI and certified digital signatures.

    Great idea, but the overhead of a practical implementation with legal safeguards is probably too high. Hmm, perhaps such caching could be construed as a "fair use" of copyright material?

    --
    You could've hired me.
  60. Re:A good suggestion, except... by epsalon · · Score: 2

    It would be very nice if there was some standard machine readable mechanism to indicate, "yes, you may cache this to avoid slashdotting this site" that the site could serve

    It's called robots.txt and that's what Google and archive.org use.

  61. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  62. Next-Generation! by jhampson · · Score: 1

    My 9 year old son is doing that now. He seems to think that I can magically transform his detailed drawings into a game. I met him less-than-half-way and installed Visual Basic on his computer. I showed him Blitz3d and now he's asking for 3DSMax to do the art. Arg!

    1. Re:Next-Generation! by jhampson · · Score: 1

      He then asked if I could install C or Java on his machine. Help me!

    2. Re:Next-Generation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      too late, you've installed vb, any future careers as a programmer are now over. hes a vb whore who can never learn another language, you've ruined your son. I hope you're happy!

    3. Re:Next-Generation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uh huh, YOU try to teach pointers, objects, malloc, overloading and the like to a 9 year old. I have trouble getting him to clean up his room, yet alone do Garbage Collection.

    4. Re:Next-Generation! by SCHecklerX · · Score: 2

      Help you? Gosh, I'd be pretty proud if I had a child that age wanting to actually figure that stuff out. Too many kids today think they are talented b/c they can make doom levels or whatever instead of actually building something on their own from scratch. Let him create, dad!

    5. Re:Next-Generation! by jhampson · · Score: 1

      Yes, I'm encouraging him. But I have 3 other boys who need time too. I don't have time(or the knowhow) to teach him how to program in C. I'll just have to get him a "Programming 3d Game Engines in C for Dummies and 9-year-olds" book.

    6. Re:Next-Generation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hehe, prodigal youth. I remember being roughly 7 when I took a serious interest in C; and boy the fun did I have spending nights programming. You really ought to let him go nuts, it did me a world of good even starting earlier than junior ;).

    7. Re:Next-Generation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The kid's a good deal smarter than you if he's rejecting Visual Basic in favour of C....

  63. It's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I am getting really sick of Slashdot wrecklessly posting links to webservers that they KNOW cannot withstand more than 5 minutes of slashdotters. These people have to pay for bandwidth most of the time, and one linking can cost the web sites several hundred dollars.

    Posting a link on slashdot is very much like a DOS attack. Slashdot knows how many users visit its site, and knows that most of the sites that they link to cannot handle the load. This is wreckless and negligent, and one day Slashdot is going to get into trouble over it.

    1. Re:It's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i agree *somewhat*. Perhaps /. should be looking into a cacheing system, or point to google's cache. I mean, most of us can understand the reasons for downloading from a mirror...yes, the slashdot effect was funny; though maybe its time we got over that and try to come up with a better solution.

      being responsible is not that difficult.

    2. Re:It's not funny. by kasperd · · Score: 1

      or point to google's cache.

      At first this does sound like a good idea, but systematically doing this might get /. into even more troubles than just linking to sites that just happens to not being able to handle the load.

      We would be facing a situation where slashdot systematically uses googles resources for another purpose than what was googles intentions with those resources.

      Creating a special /. cache would not introduce the same problem, but it could potentially be a copyright infrigement. (I don't know how google handles that.)

      Just linking to the original site is not an attempt to perform a DoS attack. /. is merely telling people that there is interesting stuff on that page. Unfortunately a lot of readers will not be able to see that interesting stuff, that is no way the intention of /., it would be nice if the servers were able to serve the pages to all the interested parties.

      --

      Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
    3. Re:It's not funny. by kasperd · · Score: 1

      or point to google's cache.

      I was able to get the page without pictures. That should be just enough to plug the actual text into google and find it in the cache. But the page apears not even to be know by google.

      The text on the top of the page said:

      A Teenage Apple IIgs Hacker's Notebook
      For your very-retro high-school hacker amusement


      but plug in enough of the words in google, and you will find nothing.

      --

      Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
    4. Re:It's not funny. by daeley · · Score: 2

      Why not do both, if the cache is available? In other words, link to original site, but have a separate cache link as well for the inevitable death of the first one.

      --
      I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
    5. Re:It's not funny. by thomas.galvin · · Score: 1

      I agree; /. should be caching these pages, linking ot the cache, and leaving the true address as a non-link for anyone who may want to bookmark the site for future reference.

      I don't even think about what I'm doing when I click a link..."hmm, that sounds interesting...oh well, another dead site." It would be better for the readers to have a cache that we know is reliable, and better for the people whos servers are getting murdered.

      To get around the copyright issues, the cache could be set up to expire in a week or so, and the editors could put a disclamer somewhere basically saying "let us know if you don't want your site cached, and we'll just link directly." Their funeral, after all...

    6. Re:It's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Actually, it is funny to most /.'ers.

      Since that would mostly include 15-year old, snot-nosed, pocket protector wearing geeks who enjoy the luxury of their parents' high-speed cable and DSL at no cost, and probably wouldn't have a clue about the costs involved in running a webserver and providing:
      • Enjoyable, well-written, compelling content.
      • High-bandwidth multimedia (not just streaming video, but just images and even complex html).
      • All provided at zero cost to the reader.


      Is it any wonder at all that when yet another small site running at low-bandwidth restriction is pummeled into oblivion by thousands of such people, these same people will sit back and snicker like it's just a big game.
    7. Re:It's not funny. by Dice2000 · · Score: 1

      "reckless" you mean

    8. Re:It's not funny. by Spunxer · · Score: 0

      I think it's pretty cool myself.

    9. Re:It's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ill repost from an earlier comment.

      And were supposed to care because? If someone is too dumb to prepare for this than that's their problem. Think about it. Your putting out a resource to the entire world that anyone can get to by the simple click of a mouse. If someone gets stuck with a huge bill they should read the fine print with their web host. Only a complete moron would put themselves in a position where they have so much to lose financially by a situation which is completely out of their control. Sorry but I don't feel sorry for someone who doesn't know how to plan.

    10. Re:It's not funny. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      To get around the copyright issues, the cache could be set up to expire in a week or so, and the editors could put a disclamer somewhere basically saying "let us know if you don't want your site cached, and we'll just link directly."

      That should not be necessary for sites that don't have a robots.txt and maybe even include a robots index,follow meta tag. These sites obviously agree to being linked from somewhere else.

    11. Re:It's not funny. by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      I agree with both of you guys.

      I mean, as a potential storefront owner (I'm working on one right now) I know first hand that the worst can happen if you pay by the meg. It might save you cash up front (your a small website, whats the worst that can happen?) but what if you get free advertisement?

      NEVER agree to something where your given a certain amount of bandwidth and then have to pay for more. (automatically, no bandwidth throttling...)

      At the least, if a provider is going to do something like this, they can offer the ability to just throttle the bandwidth to your allocated amount. I mean, automatically billing is stupid.

      --
      -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
    12. Re:It's not funny. by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

      ahhh the spelling/grammar patrol is out again.

      Just read the post and enjoy. Everyone knows you're smarter than everyone else.

      --
      -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
  64. Re:Here's that notebook by deander2 · · Score: 2

    so does anyone have a mirror of the /.ed mirror? :-)

  65. Re:A good suggestion, except... by renehollan · · Score: 2
    Yes, of course, but I don't know if "his robots.txt configuration let me scrape his site" would hold up in court -- it is a question of the law being behind the technology here.

    Furthermore, how do you defend against people changing their robots.txt configurations after the fact that their site has been scraped and claiming that scraping was not permitted in the first place?

    --
    You could've hired me.
  66. Pole Position on a TI-82 by WebMasterJoe · · Score: 2

    In high school, I had one of those TI graphing calculators. You could write programs on it, although they were fairly limited (the whole thing only had 32K memory!) and you had access to a total of 26 variables and six lists. Still, I wrote two games for it - a side-scroller spaceship-shooting-aliens game (complete with upgradeable guns when you shot x enemies down) and a vertical scrolling pole-position game. Everybody in my school with a TI-82 had a copy of those games. Sadly, though, I lost them on the day of the AP exam, and the backup I made turned out to be corrupted.

    --
    I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
    1. Re:Pole Position on a TI-82 by xpulsar87x · · Score: 1

      oh man, you made race on the ti-82? i have to thank you for keeping my sanity during high school.

    2. Re:Pole Position on a TI-82 by unDees · · Score: 1
      Heh--I remember those. I had one of the early models (TI-84? TI-81? Who can remember?). There was no keypress detection on mine, just the INPUT statement--so action games were out of the question. But I made a little Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which you could look up (for example) Earth, see a little animation of a Vogon weapon destroying it, and read the caption "Mostly harmless." I managed to get three or four entries that were (I thought) moderately amusing.

      My friends, meanwhile, had a full-on text adventure working on theirs (1 = Go north, 2 = go south, etc.). I wonder what we were supposed to be learning during Government class while we were writing and playing all these games? I guess I'll write King Bush II and find out....

      --
      "I call a baby goat a 'goatse.'" -- my non-Internet-savvy 6-year-old stepdaughter
  67. more information on that.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i remember that contest (and my own horrible abortion of an entry). anyway, campbell's game was a bit like castlevania 2: simon's quest. i think he even admitted to the similarities in his description of the game.

    he had some incredible talent at the time. i especially remember his sketch of a claw that grabbed at the protagonist. great stuff.

    1. Re:more information on that.. by NixterAg · · Score: 1

      Oh yeah. I was around 10 at the time. I bet I traced his drawings 150 times apiece. His best was the one that had the monster with a tank in place of his legs...eerily similar to the first boss in Smash TV (which I believe came out later).

      My submission was pretty horrible as well. I created what was more or less a sequel to Blaster Master. It was a lot of fun.

  68. writing down programs by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 1

    My school had crappy 286's, and I had a C64 at home. I would design programs for it in study hall, and write the program on a piece of paper for when I got home. Suprisingly, the programs would usually only require minor bugfixes.

    Tangent: The 286 network at my school had only one 20 MB hard drive (in a server machine). One day I discovered the key repeat function in Wordperfect, naturally I thought to test the limits of the system. Next day the teacher mentions that she had to delete my file, as it was taking up the entire filesystem. Oops!!
  69. I aggree by oliverthered · · Score: 2

    I run a small home server over ADSL, but I also get 20mb of web space at my ISP that can handle the bandwidth.
    A sensible self promothing poster would move there content to a high bandwidth site before posting.

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
  70. Re: Cor, I did that too!! by SilkBD · · Score: 0

    "A Mate" as in someone you regularly have sexual intercourse with in order to procreate?

    --
    00101010
  71. othello by shd99004 · · Score: 2

    I didn't plan for many games in high school... I mostly played them. Ok I did try to make some simple basketball game I believe... and I made a few games on my calculator. But I do have some notes left where I was trying to make plans for a self learning AI(!) Ofcourse nothing came out of that... Oh yeah in high school I also started this bold project of making an Othello ("Reversi" for some of you) game with an AI. I still have the code, and the most you can do is to move a cursor around and place those discs on the board. However just recently I've been planning and making notes for a Civilization like game. Ofcourse, I haven't done anything more than that.

    --
    Will work for bandwidth
  72. Remember that time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When you and your friends in high school sat around reading Slashdot articles... then you all got together and were going to make something cool and get listed on Slashdot yourself. You wrote down all the stuff in Notepad about how to build your web server to handle the traffic to keep from being Slashdotted. RAID array designs, OS choice, web server configuration... that Notepad.exe file is history.

  73. i never wrote that... by 68k+geek · · Score: 1

    "Gateway Timeout
    The following error occurred:

    Server unreachable
    Please contact the administrator."

    sound's like a great game.

  74. And I wish ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And I wish people would stop making the same damn suggestion every time we blow a website off the map. Its fine if you want to mirror is yourself, but don't put that responsibility on Slashdot.

  75. Slashdottage Avoidance Stratagems by floydigus · · Score: 1

    How about /. serves different stories to different people depending on, say, a portion of their IP address?
    In the next hour, the stories could be swapped around, spreading the /. community's attention over a longer period.
    Or, Slashdot tips the site admin the nod 2 hours before the story goes live, to give them a chance to do load balancing, sign up to a non-free host etc.

    --

    All things in moderation; including moderation

    1. Re:Slashdottage Avoidance Stratagems by The+Bungi · · Score: 2
      Every time this happens someone comes up with a scheme like this. Yours is actually one of the most interesting, actually.

      But you have to understand that the "editors" don't give a flying fuck about this and they are not going to do anything about it.

      I can almost hear them giggling hysterically: let them buy more banwith!!!1! ... hey..,. we got urselves some and we paide for it!!1!!

    2. Re:Slashdottage Avoidance Stratagems by floydigus · · Score: 1

      I don't really expect what I say to change anything, but you never know - if /. increases in popularity much further, less and less sites are going to be able to take the weight, and then they (the editors) might have to do something about it.

      --

      All things in moderation; including moderation

  76. ... looks a lot like Super Mario Brothers... by Ted_Green · · Score: 1

    Or is it just me?

  77. Slashdot Spellcheck. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whats the deal with everyone always being so critical of spelling and grammar. I understood what the guy was saying. Doenst the ability to understand porrly writtten mateereal with the grammar thats bad makes people like me way smart?????

    1. Re:Slashdot Spellcheck. by Spunxer · · Score: 1

      I think he asked for such a response.

  78. /.'d already... by Ixe · · Score: 1

    ...figures...

    This article does resonate a little bit with me though. I remember the lil game I wrote when I was in middle school.
    hehe it was a Qbasic text game with (mostly copied from BBS games) ANSI graphics but still.

    I never had to write any music though, I didn't understand copyrights then and just ripped other ppl's tunez...oops (Ne1 remember Realm's theme from FF3/6 that played in dos? I used that in there ;)

    Makes me wonder if I still have it archived somewhere....

    --
    Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
  79. The good old days... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wrote a Z80 disassembler and disassembled Manic Miner on the Sinclair Spectrum to a Thermal Printer. I then went through it by hand and commented in pen. I still remember a lot of the code in my head now. If only I could find that printout now.

  80. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by RazorJ_2000 · · Score: 1

    Only 64 windows? Big deal. Didn't even make a dent in my Win2K Pro system. Now, if you'd set it to open up 64,000 windows....

    --
    pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
  81. Re:A good suggestion, except... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then you delete the site from the cache, dick. It's not fucking brain surgery.

  82. Dead, or just defending his wallet? by moonsammy · · Score: 2

    Perhaps the webmaster is clever - knowing this is a page that might interest the slashdot crowd, he wrote a little script to check the /. front page frequently (say, once every minute or two) and if his domain ever shows up the site is immediately taken down and some sort of klaxon / alarm goes off.

    Hmm... maybe somebody could make a new product out of this concept - McAfee Slashdot Protector or Symantec Anti-Slashdot or some such. If they do, and patent it, I officially declare this post to be prior art.

    1. Re:Dead, or just defending his wallet? by Rentar · · Score: 1

      Well a simple check on the script generating the frontpage (who uses static pages? *g*) to take down the site the first time someone visits it with the referer beeing something on http://slashdot.org/.

      Would be easier on his ressources and leave us some more bandwidth to /. other sites.

  83. My notebook.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't know what's geekier, that guy's notebook full of program and game designs, or my high school notebook full of drawings that depicted various acts of brutal murder, destruction, and just general mayhem.

  84. Re: Cor, I did that too!! by brokenspoke · · Score: 1

    That was Michael Ryan I think.

    --
    -- I am Jack's sig line.
  85. Mirror by Kjellander · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm trying to mirror the site but it's going slow. Only 2 of the images so far.

    http://razor.hemmet.chalmers.se/garote.bdmonkeys.n et/notebook/

    1. Re:Mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey ... please let me know if you wanna mirror the rest of the notebook while our admin replaces the BURNED OUT hard-drive in the firewall system. (It was a 2.5-incher from a laptop ... on it's way out anyway)

      D'Oh!

      mail me at garrett@armory.com ?

  86. I wrote a purposefully half-finished one :) by ThinkingGuy · · Score: 1


    After starting 3 or 4 Zork-style text adventures (Applesoft Basic on an Apple ][e) and not finishing them, I decided to write "Unfinished Adventure."
    It was a half-serious game where you wandered around a half-finished text-game world. For example there was a castle you could walk behind, and see that it was just a prop made of canvas. You could also go "offstage" to the green room, and meet non-player characters, who were sitting, learning their parts. And every once in a while, and "game designer" character would appear, walking around trying to "debug" the game.

  87. Goatsh.it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...offtopic goatshit...

    Is that at www.goatsh.it ?

  88. similar but not quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hmmm, I had a similar lunch time geek notebook... only I never really got into gaming. My notebook was filled with ideas on how to put together a package to do algebra, trig, and calc manipulations on a VIC20 and later C64. This was early on in the life of the 64 so probably about '83 through'85 (IIRC). To this day, I wonder if I should have pursued a patent on the idea. Wolfram bandaged his old numerical routines together to make Mathematica in about '86. D**n, I coulda been rich, but then I probably wouldn't have the deep meaningful life I have now.

  89. Ireland a Powerhouse in Beef, Lags in Misc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    I basically am about to get a degree in potato farming and the Irish Potato Famine just happened.
    It seems that Ireland's potato crop never really recovered, according to the Fapri-Ireland Partnership.

    Examination of the data shows that Ireland lags behind the UK in potato production by a wide margin, and is no longer a power in wheat, pigmeat (yes, pigmeat, all one word), or misc. Particularly worrying is the state of misc., which is crushingly dominated by Greece.

    You can get the skinny on Irish agriculture here.

    I'm afraid the spokesmen for Irish spud jingoism have a lot to answer for.
  90. Nope. by Russ+Steffen · · Score: 2

    Well, I never kept a notebook. That's just more evidence they can use against you at the trial.

  91. Tell us more about this by Timwit · · Score: 1

    What's the deal with geekshelf.com? Why can't the public browse through the folders? Why the heck don't they have and "About" section? Is it a non-profit or what?

    1. Re:Tell us more about this by The+Dev · · Score: 2

      There are about a dozen links on the homepage
      for browsing through folders. Try "Recent Gallery Uploads".
      New uploads are held for moderation (unfortunate but necessary). Once moderated, any visitor can
      browse the folder. Even when not yet moderated,
      the files are viewable to the owner, and deep-linking works all the time (moderated or not).

      It is a spinoff of Brickshelf. Brickshelf has a LEGO only gallery. On Geekshelf, anything "geeky" is on-topic.

  92. Here's a link to the Google cache by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  93. Not only did I have a game concept notebook... by Uthers · · Score: 1

    But hanks to my school's independent study program, I actually got class credit for it. I even got to list time spent on slashdot as "research." modern education is truly a marvelous thing.

    --
    -Uther
  94. No, I Just Didn't Get Invited by grendelkhan · · Score: 2

    No, I wondered about that too, just didn't get invited to any of the parties. And I was obsesses with all of the female anatomy, not just the breasts.

    --
    Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
  95. [OT] your sig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the best way to not lose your +1 bonus is to not post trolls/flames/crap. The worst way to get it back is to beg.

    1. Re:[OT] your sig by gazbo · · Score: 1, Offtopic
      Well, thanks professor. I have always enjoyed posting trolls and some good comments, hence my karma remained around 30-40 for some time. Then, slashdot got gayer and gayer, until now it is at the point where I read it maybe once a week. When I do post it is to post shit maybe 9 times out of ten.

      As for my sig, bearing in mind that my 30-40 karma is now due to go negative after this post, maybe, just maybe my post lamenting my lack of 26 karma is a little disingenuous? Maybe my use of the words 'plz' and 'kthx' should hint that sincerity is not at the forefront of my agenda?

      I don't really care about my karma other than hopefully keeping enough to avoid the 2 post per day rule (thanks Taco for showing your trust in moderation by bypassing it)

      Incidentally, as a fun experiment to play with /. moderation, I suggest you try the following: post some insightful comments and see the occasional one get modded to three. Now post a lame ass joke, and watch it rocket to 5. Karma is easy to get by anyone who is willing to play the game. I'm not playing the game, Slashdot is dying.

      Really, take a look around. How shit are the stories? How one sided are all the comments? The only arguments you see now on /. are whether MySQL or Postgres is the better DB. The rest is self congratulatory circle jerking "Oooh, sticking that sticker on your case is a great case mod! I'm so glad you posted it to Slashdot."

      PS. Postgres is better.

  96. Holy Crap! by Nerviswreck · · Score: 0

    I didnt know anybody else's school had a krunch koral. Wierd...

  97. Re:Slashdot is getting lame.... by captjc · · Score: 1

    Yes M*A*S*H is great, but when you have seen EVERY episode at least 25 times each, it gets a bit repetitive.

    --
    Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
  98. Re:Remember when? High school? by Spunxer · · Score: 1

    Pretty brave of you to write that message from a microsoft network with no anonymous proxy.

  99. Commie 64 by xtremex · · Score: 1

    Man, this brings back memories. When I was in HS, (mid 80's), the Commodore 64 ruled and all the cool kids had a Commodore. We used to make demos and pass them around on all the BBS's. There was "l33tness" back then too. The Commie users were the gurus, the kids who had the Apple IIe were laughable. If you had an Adam, you didnt even count!. Of course, there was the Atari 800XL series, and if you were REALLY cool ("rich") you got an AMiga when you went to College. YOU were then the cool kid :)

    --
    If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
  100. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fuck em, we don't care what browser they use, but if they use an insecure one, people are sure as hell going to fuck with them and crash their computers.

    Besides, only posers and idiots run windows. They fucking deserve it.

  101. Re:Here's that notebook by Idarubicin · · Score: 1

    But it's bad luck to break a mirror...

    --
    ~Idarubicin
  102. Re:Remember when? High school? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Out of morbid curiosity, how do you know what
    IP he was posting from?

  103. "Gameboard" notebook by Koyaanisqatsi · · Score: 1

    At some point during high school I remember using a notebook for playing chess and checkers. For obvious reasons, boards were not allowed during class time, but you know there are some *really* boring classes and you gotta find something to keep you awake.

    We would layout the checkered pattern with a pen, with minimal difference between dark and white squares, then use pencil and rubber to "move" the pieces around. Each match demanded a new page, as the previous one was trashed.

  104. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Kinda like +++ in a chatroom about 7 years ago. I would be one of those pricks that would go +++, and just watch everyone drop carrier. :-) I loved the good old days!

  105. Re:Remember when? High school? by rgremill · · Score: 1

    That's how every business works.

  106. Poor Kid! by LeiraHoward · · Score: 2

    What kind of person are you, anyway? ;)
    Submitting a link to a kid's site on /. ! That's sort of like sending out a hit squad.. his poor 100Mhz server feels the pain...

    Here's from his site: "Thank god for my slow upload speed, or my poor little 100mhz linux server would be getting owned. I guess our site got posted in a slashdot comment, and now im getting quite a few hits (alot more then my 256k upload can handle). So, i guess if you are reading this, you are lucky to get through :D"

  107. No computers when I was in high school by mesocyclone · · Score: 2

    Alright... this makes me an old fogey... but there were no computers available when I was in high school. The only computer I had even SEEN in person was MANIAC, because it lived across the street from me (at UNM) when I was in Junior High School.

    So us high school nerds played chess instead.

    My first year out of high school (1965), OTOH, got me hooked on computers - Fortran programming on a 7094 at the University.... and life has been nerd-dom ever since!

    Me thinks the slashdot folks are a bit, shall we say, less experienced (all right... younger :-) in life.

    --

    The only good weather is bad weather.

    1. Re:No computers when I was in high school by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Man, fortran looks the age too..wow.

  108. Me: "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!..." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mods: "...shut up! That's "offtopic". Now, back to our discussion about about high school..."

  109. Middle School by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In middle school I wrote a shareware Post-It Note program and sold it on AOL (before www) and I got probably 20 to 25 checks in the mail. My parents were perplexed. Then I dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University because I did too many drugs and now I write software that diagnosis people with drug addiction and mental illness vis a vis the DSM-IV criteria for Washington University's Epidemiology Research and Prevention Group. WOOHOO! Kill me now, please.

  110. I used 2 of my notebooks!! by mustangdavis · · Score: 1

    I actually got to live out my dream. STORY TIME: Five of my buddies and I used to "live" in the University computer lab (ordered pizza; played PC games, Play Station, & cards; took naps, got phone calls there; etc ... ALL from the lab) while we were undergrads. One day, we were all playing an online game called Earth 2025 (swirve.com) ... and one person said "Hey, this game is slow ... couldn't we make a better one?" ... Everyone's eyes got big, and a year later, we had our own game, War II (http://war.darkent.com). We took a month, laid out the plans for our game (actually, we laid out a couple games, then picked what we thought was the best one ... and the one that we thought we could finish). And people just thought we were waisting all that time in the PC lab playing games!!! War II started off as a free game that we ran out of a couple friends' dorm rooms (on University bandwidth), but the evil University caught on to us after a couple months (it was using too much bandwidth), so we had to put annoying banner ads on the gamne to pay for the bandwidth. I still remember when we had our 100th person sign up. It was a feeling like no other. Although it is just a simple browser game, I would HIGHLY recommend to anyone thinging about writing a game to write a browser based game first. The FANTASTIC feeling you'll get from having other people playing your game is like no other (we have over 20,000 people playing our games now), but you will also see first hand how difficult it is to write a balanced game. You'll also see how critical people can be of your hard work. It will help humble you TREMENDOUSLY!! (You'll never think you are the ultimate game creator after a 12 year old tells you where your game isn't balanced). You'll also see that creating a GOOD game (not some piece of junk like 90% of the games out there) is not NEARLY as easy as one would think. Just making a SECURE multiplayer version of a game is almost impossible. You'll never believe how much people love to cheat! We've since wrote another game (Space .. voted Game of the Month of www.mpogd.com last month) and are working on a third game (Dark Age). Still, if you have a love of games and are luckey enough to assemble the talent needed to create a game, DO IT!!! A chance like that only passes most people once in a lifetime ... so grab it while the opportunity is there! Of course, it helps to have friends that live in dorm rooms that have free bandwidth to get started. Start up costs are evil things too!

  111. We even slashdotted... by CaptTrips · · Score: 0

    ...the main domain

    --

    grep >= ! == $your
  112. every geek has that book. by benson+hedges · · Score: 1
    the nice thing about such sketchbooks is, that, if you write them at a time where you have not seen deeper programming depths than pascal and basic, you can think up anything you want, no matter if it's doable or not.

    real time real life animation, extremely complex multiplayer enviroments, real time simulations that run for months without pause, fps games with a real story... phantasy is the best compiler.

    and, maybe in ten years, there will be a language/system that allows to realize the things you made up in your mind... let's just hope you can find your sketchbook ;)

    --
    Karma : Soylent Green (Mostly due to eating junk food and mocking religion)
  113. does a vector game on a pdp-11/34 count? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    it was huge, maybe 8k or something... and it was you, looking out the widow of your starfighter shooting at three-spoked objects. they tured into a circle for a second when you got them. im not quite sure how, or how many linchtimes, but i manged to write it.

  114. Re:Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lol linux sux0r is standard trolling fair... remember?

    Also dude don't say you're a Linux hippie, those are the bad kind of Linux user!

    Yeah Mozilla.

  115. golden note book by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    well when I came across one of my old school NB's
    I decided to creat one of the idea's within...

    now I'm currently doing 30 years.. ;>

    cya/.

  116. Re:My little game.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can always count on kikes to go complaining to the authorities. Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

  117. thief by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    yes you are too

    your friend pirated quake1

    you know he did now you are responsible too

    prepare yourself because all your house are belong by ID slothware

  118. Re:The good news is... you are not a stupid mick by nosnorb · · Score: 0

    ...or a dumb redneck who--of course--posts anonymously.

  119. Re:A mirror for the notebook... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Happily my old school porn browsing skills are still in order rapid alt+f4 faster than the windows pop up wins every time.

  120. Re:A mirror for the notebook... [Y2KBugs Bunny] by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm sorry, you weren't the target audience then.
    I salute you. Open -$ource Hippies still suck monkey balls.

  121. arrrgh! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sorry guys ... the web admin of bdmonkeys.net is currently reinstalling the firewall software ... the load from /. was so high that the internal hard drive overheated and now no longer responds. The firewall is Linux-based, and can run in 16 megs of RAM, booting from a write-protected floppy if neccessary ... and that's the way he was originally going to set it up ... but he decided to write logs to the hard-drive. Needless to say, the drive filled up, everything overheated, and we've got one frustrated web admin. The home domain is up -- www.bdmonkeys.net -- but it will be a while longer before he brings the virtual domains back online, possibly the rest of the night.

  122. Re:Slash Cache? too costly... by Jonny+290 · · Score: 2

    Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over.

    Judging from all the editors' comments that "people don't come here to read the comments", by process of elimination they come here to read the front page and visit neat links. And if they want to keep shoving ads down our throat and bitching about [donations|subscriptions|/. pity parties], they'd better deliver the fucking content. And if the content is on a DSL line with a P2 as a webserver, it's their responsibility to ensure that i'm getting some value in exchange for that annoying banner ad at top.

    Just like the elitist fucks that review 7 inch singles that nobody can find in indie magazines and then bitch about why nobody cares about their reviews.

    --
    Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
  123. could anyone who has it all mirror it ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    thanks in advance :-p

  124. Prodigal youth by ObitMan · · Score: 0

    "Prodigal" because he's using Visual Basic?
    Or "Prodigy" because he now wants to use C?

    --
    Who run Barter Town?
    1. Re:Prodigal youth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He's moving on past the filth of VB at an early age, and that's impressive :-). Good luck to him.

  125. Re:Slash Cache? too costly... by P!Alexander · · Score: 1

    Why don't they make it a value-added service for subscribers only? That should balance the bandwidth by making it 1)not usable by most Slashdot users thus decreasing the bandwidth requirement and 2)if enough users signed up and starting eating massive bandwidth there would be money there to support it.

    Get a clue Slashdot!

  126. Looks like I got canned by Slashdot! by Android606 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hey, everyone. This is the guy that runs bdmonkeys.net.

    You might be entertained to know that Slashdot managed to completely annihilate my firewall in just about 2 1/2 hours!

    The firewall box was a little 486-66 with 24 megs running Linux out of a RAMdisk.

    The data on the hard drive (The boot media) has somehow been corrupted. I can mount it on another machine, but I can't boot from it at all. Interesting, considering that the drive wasn't even mounted at the time it died...
    Also, the machine is totally flaky now. Memory errors out the wazoo. I can boot from a floppy, but it'll only stay up 5--30 minutes. I think you guys actually managed to completely trash this machine! :-)

    When I first found it, it was just spewing a bunch of hex numbers to the screen. Probably BIOS error codes or something, I don't know.
    No big deal. It completely cracked me up yesterday when I saw that my machine was actually *physically damaged* by the Slashdot Effect. :-)

    So, I picked up a P-150 with 64 MB today for $20. I finally got it configured about 20 minutes ago.

    The instant I brought it up, the "ACTIVITY" light went solid.

    Anyone wanna make any guesses how long this one will last?

    --
    My hovercraft is full of eels!
  127. Wow.... by LeGeNDaRy(NeW)B · · Score: 1

    If I did learn anything in my 18 years on this planet then I would think you people were insane.

    Then I start remembering the time when my friends and I were going to make a gameing server and get people to join and pay $5 a month for access and have nothing on it. Then we remembered that we were drunk and had another beer.