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."
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!!!!
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.
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.
There's a mirror right here
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.
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.
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...
It's gone. Too many jpegs? No mirror, no google cache, no nada. Just gone.
funny munging
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
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!"
We were too busy fending off those big goons who tried to take our lunch money.
"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!"
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
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!
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.
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?
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"...
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
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.
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
Now my 14 year old son has one. Hell, he may end up like me. Jeez.. I better talk to that kid!
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.)
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.
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
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.