Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
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"...
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?
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.) :). I had to get new friends to do it though :(.
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
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...)
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.)
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.