I have to laugh every time I see something put the words 'fun', 'game', and 'Raph Koster' into a sentence together.
After Starwars Galaxies I have to wonder about him. If that game was seriously his idea of 'fun' I don't think I'd ever go to his house for lunch or anything lest I end up on the menu...
The simple fact that he and his campaign managers were smart enough to buy ads in a number of Videogames and NOT tell anyone about it buys him my vote (if I could vote). It shows an understanding of people in my demographic (and people in general) that the Republicans, frankly, don't have.
Politics is extremely important to technology right now, and nerds should care.
The thing is that tech is still somewhat in it's infancy so far as legislation goes. Most politicians at the presidential level aren't familiar with any of it either because they're too old (McCain) or it's not their forte (Obama).
In a generation or so the average politician will have grown up with the tech that we're all familiar with. Remember, we're the exception not the rule so far as familiarity goes.
How technology gets treated in the future, I feel, will be based on legislation that gets passed between now and then. If we elect ignorant politicans and ignore our duty to vote (thereby leaving the decisions in the hands of the ignorant masses that DO vote) we'll have a legislative base that won't encourage innovation and won't protect the people it should.
It's important, and threads like this very much belong on slashdot.
IMO (because I have nothing to back this up) the Republicans threw in the towel when they allowed McCain to even run.
He's not what they needed to win. They needed someone who was basically a knight in shining armor. The exact opposite of the last 8 years.
They presented McCain, who's presidency would simply be 4-8 more years of the exact same.
Pallin is simply their attempt to spit-polish the McCain team. If you look at her, or listen to her, she's an air-head soccer mom. They chose her because she looks good on camera as well as trying to counter-balance the "first black man in the white house" claim the democrats have with Obama with their own "first woman in the white house" claim (ignoring the simple fact that it's black president vs. woman vice president).
Basically, the whole thing is the Republicans trying to shore up their bet for the 2008 election with a pair that will allow the party to look good even as they lose.
Yes. I'm saying the previous 8 years guarantee the Republicans don't stand a chance because the White Knight they needed didn't exist in their party. They don't attract, and don't recruit, that kind of politician.
Now, if they had pushed Palin as their Presidential nominee with McCain as her Vice President...they might have done a bit better assuming they spun things harder and were able to pass Palin over as more of a go-getter and less an air-head soccer mom. Unfortunately, her record in Alaska dashed that hope.
Wait for the 2012 elections. You'll see the Republicans bring out their big guns again if Obama doesn't have a perfect presidency. Any mistakes and they'll put him in their crosshairs immediately. It will be Clinton all over again scandal-wise.
I personally expect something gang-related that's complete and utter crap yet manages to score a surprising amount of front-page media coverage for how bad it smells.
The problem with teaching PHP to beginners is that you also need to teach them HTML.
...which also goes against the "never teach more than one language to beginners" mantra.
Granted it's a markup language rather than a programming language, but a beginner won't understand the difference.
IMO C or Python are the best beginner languages right now unless your class somehow has a web class as a prereq that teaches raw HTML rather than an editor like dreamweaver.
Then you could start with javascript.
No compiler to worry about, and running the code is trivial at worst.
Colors have a huge effect on how tired your eyes get, and how quickly they tire.
Your eyes interpret color through a number of cones. One way your eyes can become tired is when the cones in your eyes get too used to one specific color and begin having trouble interpreting the color on the opposite end of the color wheel. The same thing can happen to the rods in your eyes if you take in too much bright light. However, the worst offender is when your eyes are forced to interpret opposite colors on the color wheel at the same time. Think of it as trying to do two things at once that are about as opposite as you can get...like eating and running. Your eyes don't like to do it.
Ever been driving or at the movies and a bright reflection or flashes from the screen leave you seeing afterimages of what you just saw? You know, when you close your eyes and you can still see the general shape of what you were looking at or even, sometimes, pick out detail if you shut your eyes?
That's the rods and cones in your eyes tiring out from being overstimulated.
As a web developer and web surfer I personally found that the easiest way to keep your eyes from tiring out is to stay away from color schemes that utilize bright polar opposite colors. If you want an example, make a quick web page.
In the body tag include this property: style="background-color: #000000;" In the page body include a h1 tag or two that say something in caps and include this property: style="color: #FFFFFF;"
Now look at the page in your web browser and stare at the header text for ten to twenty seconds and close your eyes.
Neat huh?
Now give your eyes a rest, change the color value in the header tags to #888888 and take another look.
Easier on the eyes right? If you want to play some more try it with bright red and bright blue. You'll get much the same effect.
Off-centering one of the colors avoids polar opposites on the color wheel and is much easier on the eyes.
I always had trouble working with word processors for long periods of time because the default color scheme was black text on a white background. If your monitor's turned up too high it's murder on your eyes; like trying to read or write on the beach without an umbrella or shade. Ever try reading in the sun? Almost impossible right? Same problem.
I fix the problem by changing the default background color to a light gray. Much easier on the eyes even if your monitor's brightness is turned up.
A bad IDE will write code for you. It will be canned, standardized, and, depending on the IDE, inefficient, poorly commented, hard to follow (god forbid you change something...like say MSVS auto-generated ADO.NET DB connection code...unless you know exactly what you're doing), and/or containing a lot of extra crap. Take a look at web pages made with MS Front Page. Especially the older versions of Front Page. Ugh...
A good IDE doesn't write code for you. It helps you write better code faster by helping catch spelling errors, help keep your code consistent (auto-indenting is my favorite feature), and help automate tedious, repetitive tasks (Notepad++ and pretty much every command line editor descendant on Linix/Unix have duplicate line commands available via keyboard shortcut. So simple, so useful...so hard to find in windows apps...)
A good coder will know when to let the IDE do its thing, and when to roll up his sleeves and do it himself.
You're talking about companies who make software that acts as a bullet-proof vest for your system, but in exchange:
1) Increases your system startup time significantly.
2) Systematically interrupt whatever program you're running to notify you it's doing something you probably told it to do.
3) Thrash your RAM whenever it does anything rather than sandbox itself.
4) Insist on running at the highest priority possible and take over your system when it runs rather than something more friendly like...oh...run at a low priority and wait until you're not actually doing anything to take up major resources.
So we're basically wondering why the people who make software that does roughly the same thing as a virus to your system (minus the extremely, intentionally harmful stuff) would get upset at a contest (run at a Defense Convention no less) where the intent is to bypass their software rather than see it as an opportunity to improve their product?
Slashdot Mirror
I have to laugh every time I see something put the words 'fun', 'game', and 'Raph Koster' into a sentence together. After Starwars Galaxies I have to wonder about him. If that game was seriously his idea of 'fun' I don't think I'd ever go to his house for lunch or anything lest I end up on the menu...
The simple fact that he and his campaign managers were smart enough to buy ads in a number of Videogames and NOT tell anyone about it buys him my vote (if I could vote). It shows an understanding of people in my demographic (and people in general) that the Republicans, frankly, don't have.
The media isn't sick of the Republicans...
...it's owned by the Republicans.
There's a difference!
Politics is extremely important to technology right now, and nerds should care.
The thing is that tech is still somewhat in it's infancy so far as legislation goes. Most politicians at the presidential level aren't familiar with any of it either because they're too old (McCain) or it's not their forte (Obama).
In a generation or so the average politician will have grown up with the tech that we're all familiar with. Remember, we're the exception not the rule so far as familiarity goes.
How technology gets treated in the future, I feel, will be based on legislation that gets passed between now and then. If we elect ignorant politicans and ignore our duty to vote (thereby leaving the decisions in the hands of the ignorant masses that DO vote) we'll have a legislative base that won't encourage innovation and won't protect the people it should.
It's important, and threads like this very much belong on slashdot.
IMO (because I have nothing to back this up) the Republicans threw in the towel when they allowed McCain to even run.
He's not what they needed to win. They needed someone who was basically a knight in shining armor. The exact opposite of the last 8 years.
They presented McCain, who's presidency would simply be 4-8 more years of the exact same.
Pallin is simply their attempt to spit-polish the McCain team. If you look at her, or listen to her, she's an air-head soccer mom. They chose her because she looks good on camera as well as trying to counter-balance the "first black man in the white house" claim the democrats have with Obama with their own "first woman in the white house" claim (ignoring the simple fact that it's black president vs. woman vice president).
Basically, the whole thing is the Republicans trying to shore up their bet for the 2008 election with a pair that will allow the party to look good even as they lose.
Yes. I'm saying the previous 8 years guarantee the Republicans don't stand a chance because the White Knight they needed didn't exist in their party. They don't attract, and don't recruit, that kind of politician.
Now, if they had pushed Palin as their Presidential nominee with McCain as her Vice President...they might have done a bit better assuming they spun things harder and were able to pass Palin over as more of a go-getter and less an air-head soccer mom. Unfortunately, her record in Alaska dashed that hope.
Wait for the 2012 elections. You'll see the Republicans bring out their big guns again if Obama doesn't have a perfect presidency. Any mistakes and they'll put him in their crosshairs immediately. It will be Clinton all over again scandal-wise.
I personally expect something gang-related that's complete and utter crap yet manages to score a surprising amount of front-page media coverage for how bad it smells.
The problem with teaching PHP to beginners is that you also need to teach them HTML.
...which also goes against the "never teach more than one language to beginners" mantra.
Granted it's a markup language rather than a programming language, but a beginner won't understand the difference.
IMO C or Python are the best beginner languages right now unless your class somehow has a web class as a prereq that teaches raw HTML rather than an editor like dreamweaver.
Then you could start with javascript.
No compiler to worry about, and running the code is trivial at worst.
This might be fine for a hobbyist
The guy is building a computer to watch tv.
The new season of Heroes starts soon. I'd call that "extremely flammable" at least where data-loss is concerned!
Colors have a huge effect on how tired your eyes get, and how quickly they tire.
Your eyes interpret color through a number of cones. One way your eyes can become tired is when the cones in your eyes get too used to one specific color and begin having trouble interpreting the color on the opposite end of the color wheel. The same thing can happen to the rods in your eyes if you take in too much bright light. However, the worst offender is when your eyes are forced to interpret opposite colors on the color wheel at the same time. Think of it as trying to do two things at once that are about as opposite as you can get...like eating and running. Your eyes don't like to do it.
Ever been driving or at the movies and a bright reflection or flashes from the screen leave you seeing afterimages of what you just saw? You know, when you close your eyes and you can still see the general shape of what you were looking at or even, sometimes, pick out detail if you shut your eyes?
That's the rods and cones in your eyes tiring out from being overstimulated.
As a web developer and web surfer I personally found that the easiest way to keep your eyes from tiring out is to stay away from color schemes that utilize bright polar opposite colors. If you want an example, make a quick web page.
In the body tag include this property: style="background-color: #000000;"
In the page body include a h1 tag or two that say something in caps and include this property: style="color: #FFFFFF;"
Now look at the page in your web browser and stare at the header text for ten to twenty seconds and close your eyes.
Neat huh?
Now give your eyes a rest, change the color value in the header tags to #888888 and take another look.
Easier on the eyes right? If you want to play some more try it with bright red and bright blue. You'll get much the same effect.
Off-centering one of the colors avoids polar opposites on the color wheel and is much easier on the eyes.
I always had trouble working with word processors for long periods of time because the default color scheme was black text on a white background. If your monitor's turned up too high it's murder on your eyes; like trying to read or write on the beach without an umbrella or shade. Ever try reading in the sun? Almost impossible right? Same problem.
I fix the problem by changing the default background color to a light gray. Much easier on the eyes even if your monitor's brightness is turned up.
Ever wondered why they picked the '.' for a concatenation operator over the trusty '+'?
PHP is a loosely-typed language.
The '+' is also the arithmetic operator.
Is a line of code reading
$c = $a + $b
adding $a and $b? or is it concatenating them?
What if $a = 513 and $b = 4201?
Are we talking about a phone number? Or am I trying to come up with $c = 4714?
There was a very good reason for having '.' as the concatenation operator.
A bad IDE will write code for you. It will be canned, standardized, and, depending on the IDE, inefficient, poorly commented, hard to follow (god forbid you change something...like say MSVS auto-generated ADO.NET DB connection code...unless you know exactly what you're doing), and/or containing a lot of extra crap. Take a look at web pages made with MS Front Page. Especially the older versions of Front Page. Ugh...
A good IDE doesn't write code for you. It helps you write better code faster by helping catch spelling errors, help keep your code consistent (auto-indenting is my favorite feature), and help automate tedious, repetitive tasks (Notepad++ and pretty much every command line editor descendant on Linix/Unix have duplicate line commands available via keyboard shortcut. So simple, so useful...so hard to find in windows apps...)
A good coder will know when to let the IDE do its thing, and when to roll up his sleeves and do it himself.
At the end of the day they're just tools.
You're talking about companies who make software that acts as a bullet-proof vest for your system, but in exchange:
...why is this surprise?
1) Increases your system startup time significantly.
2) Systematically interrupt whatever program you're running to notify you it's doing something you probably told it to do.
3) Thrash your RAM whenever it does anything rather than sandbox itself.
4) Insist on running at the highest priority possible and take over your system when it runs rather than something more friendly like...oh...run at a low priority and wait until you're not actually doing anything to take up major resources.
So we're basically wondering why the people who make software that does roughly the same thing as a virus to your system (minus the extremely, intentionally harmful stuff) would get upset at a contest (run at a Defense Convention no less) where the intent is to bypass their software rather than see it as an opportunity to improve their product?