I have: - A lava lamp - SIX jars of peanuts (none of them mine!?) - two plants - a rear-view mirror (so I can see who's walking up behind me) - a phone - vitamins - a clock radio - a beanie furby - a gyroscope - a kooshball - books, magazines, pens, paper,.. - a floppy drive
Okay, so maybe having a floppy drive on my desk is geeky.
I participated in the ACM contests many many years ago. I was somewhat unhappy with the way the international level was run. One year, AT&T sponsored the contest, so they forced us to use SysV Unix and vi. Well, gosh, I had been raised on (gasp) PC editors, where I could use *cursor keys* to move around, and I was plonked into vi. I learned jklh as well as 'i' for insert and 'x' for delete one character. That slowed me down tremendously. Oh well. That wasn't my major complaint though. The main problem was that the contests are in an artificial setting -- your judges are sitting high above, handing down yes/no verdicts, without explaining WHY. Okay, fine. That's just how the contest is run. But what bugs me is that at the ceremony, when they're describing the contest to representatives from industry and government, they say that the contest is very much like the REAL WORLD! HELLO! In the real world your customers can tell you what they don't like. They don't come back and say, "no". It's a completely different environment when you can communicate with your customer -- to get clarification of requirements, to find out what they didn't like, to modify the requirements, and so on. In the ACM contest (back then, at least), you just can't communicate with the judges. You're totally isolated. Then they mislead the press into believing that doing well in these situations (learning unfamiliar tools in an hour, not communicating with customers, using no libraries) are somehow correlated with success in the real world. Bah.
I had a lot more fun at the IEEE contests, run by none other than Mr. Transmeta, Dave Taylor.
Actually, what *really* tore me away from BBSes was LambdaMOO. It's still alive at telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888/ and I'm still there as Mat (also Amit). I toyed with the idea of making a "door" game inside of MOO but I didn't have the time.:-(
Correction: The guy who made Barren Realms Elite went on to do Falcon's Eye, Earth:2025, and Echelon Entertainment. The guy who made Solar Realms Elite became addicted to Slashdot and will get back into writing games when he finds more spare time.:-)
Of course, emacs is so far behind.. that's why I only use XEmacs now.:-) W3 is still too slow, but it's cool seeing graphical pages with proportional fonts, jpg, gif.. in a buffer.
I think you want to be careful about what words you ask Google to search for. It's going to give you pages that have ALL the words you type in.
The bad word here is "info". There may be many Quake 3 pages that DON'T have the word "info". Perhaps they have "information" or they just don't have any variant of it. By searching for
"Quake +3" info
You've restricted yourself to only pages that use the word "info". Try this search instead:
"Quake +3"
and I think you'll find better results.
- Amit
Re:Why I have given up on search engines....
on
Google is launched!
·
· Score: 1
If you do a "Netscape" search, it goes first to ODP and then to Google, so you can have it both ways.:-)
Re:Farewell, Link Lists/The Mysterious Googleburn
on
Google is launched!
·
· Score: 1
The "back link" feature is still there, as well as a "forward link" feature. The help.html page tells you how to get to both of them. It's no longer a click away, but it is still there.
The help page (http://www.google.com/help.html) says that they do support the NOT (-) operator. Google also supports "" for word adjacency (although not for literal text search).
Um, there's only ONE line of Javascript, and that's on the home page, to set the focus to the search box. JavaScript is not required, nor is it extensively used.
Google's algorithm is simpler than the one described in Scientific American. The Clever project marks certain pages (authorities) as having _content_ and other pages (hubs) as having links to good pages. Content doesn't necessarily have links to good pages, and good pages don't necessarily have content. Google treats everything the same, so in theory it's not as good. Still, since the IBM folk don't have anything available for us to try it's hard to compare.
There's an algorithm called D* that has been proved optimal for things like fog of war (where "optimal" means it best used the available information, without trying to guess and getting lucky). However I don't know of anything that's proved optimal for enemy movements.
Um, they have several Sherlock plugins listed in the "More Google..." link. (See http://www.google.com/defaults.html) They just don't advertise it on their front page. If they advertised everything they have on the front page, the people in this forum would be complaining about how cluttered the interface is.;-)
I would have to agree... writing games isn't so different from writing some other program; you just use different libraries. Learn a programming language and how to write programs. Learn the libraries you might want to use.
Please don't give me a "Game programming" book that introduces me to C and Windows and how to use a joystick. Give me a book that talks about game design -- what makes a game fun? What data structures and algorithms do games typically use? Why would you choose 2D over 3D or vice versa? What kinds of games are better as single-player? How do you write decent game AI?
Google has had trouble with their service provider over the last week.:( Things seem a little better now.
Text-only AltaVista won't give you the refinement suggestions, which I think are really neat. For example, searching for "Explorer" gives you "Ford Explorer" and "Internet Explorer" as suggested refinements.
There's also a text-only HotBot at: http://www.hotbot.com/lite/
I mostly use Linux now, but I still boot into OS/2 a few times a week. I still like the OS/2 shell (Workplace Shell) much better than GNOME or KDE's desktop. I like OS/2 Communicator better than Linux Communicator or Navigator (especially the "search history" feature, which seems to be completely absent in the Linux version).
The main reason I use Linux is that I like XEmacs much better than normal FSF Emacs, and in OS/2 I only have FSF Emacs.:-( (I have bash, emacs, pgcc, python, XFree86, tf, and plenty of other "unix" stuff for OS/2, but not XEmacs. Argh!)
I guess I can blame Jamie Zawinski for getting me to switch to Linux. I bet he hates that.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're geekier than me.
..
I have:
- A lava lamp
- SIX jars of peanuts (none of them mine!?)
- two plants
- a rear-view mirror (so I can see who's walking up behind me)
- a phone
- vitamins
- a clock radio
- a beanie furby
- a gyroscope
- a kooshball
- books, magazines, pens, paper,
- a floppy drive
Okay, so maybe having a floppy drive on my desk is geeky.
I participated in the ACM contests many many years ago. I was somewhat unhappy with the way the international level was run. One year, AT&T sponsored the contest, so they forced us to use SysV Unix and vi. Well, gosh, I had been raised on (gasp) PC editors, where I could use *cursor keys* to move around, and I was plonked into vi. I learned jklh as well as 'i' for insert and 'x' for delete one character. That slowed me down tremendously. Oh well. That wasn't my major complaint though. The main problem was that the contests are in an artificial setting -- your judges are sitting high above, handing down yes/no verdicts, without explaining WHY. Okay, fine. That's just how the contest is run. But what bugs me is that at the ceremony, when they're describing the contest to representatives from industry and government, they say that the contest is very much like the REAL WORLD! HELLO! In the real world your customers can tell you what they don't like. They don't come back and say, "no". It's a completely different environment when you can communicate with your customer -- to get clarification of requirements, to find out what they didn't like, to modify the requirements, and so on. In the ACM contest (back then, at least), you just can't communicate with the judges. You're totally isolated. Then they mislead the press into believing that doing well in these situations (learning unfamiliar tools in an hour, not communicating with customers, using no libraries) are somehow correlated with success in the real world. Bah.
I had a lot more fun at the IEEE contests, run by none other than Mr. Transmeta, Dave Taylor.
- Amit
If I remember right, Feynmann was pushing for nanotechnology back in the 50s. Maybe we'll nominate him for the NEXT millennium ..
Actually, what *really* tore me away from BBSes was LambdaMOO. It's still alive at telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888/ and I'm still there as Mat (also Amit). I toyed with the idea of making a "door" game inside of MOO but I didn't have the time. :-(
- Amit
Correction: The guy who made Barren Realms Elite went on to do Falcon's Eye, Earth:2025, and Echelon Entertainment. The guy who made Solar Realms Elite became addicted to Slashdot and will get back into writing games when he finds more spare time. :-)
- Amit
Of course, emacs is so far behind .. that's why I only use XEmacs now. :-) W3 is still too slow, but it's cool seeing graphical pages with proportional fonts, jpg, gif .. in a buffer.
Actually, Slashdot readers had it a LONG time ago. The only thing that's changed is that memepool added the "himself" at the end.
I think you want to be careful about what words you ask Google to search for. It's going to give you pages that have ALL the words you type in.
The bad word here is "info". There may be many
Quake 3 pages that DON'T have the word "info". Perhaps they have "information" or they just don't have any variant of it. By searching for
"Quake +3" info
You've restricted yourself to only pages that use the word "info". Try this search instead:
"Quake +3"
and I think you'll find better results.
- Amit
If you do a "Netscape" search, it goes first to ODP and then to Google, so you can have it both ways. :-)
- Amit
The workhorse uses Linux.
Linux. Linux. Linux everywhere.
The "back link" feature is still there, as well as a "forward link" feature. The help.html page tells you how to get to both of them. It's no longer a click away, but it is still there.
AltaVista's text-only option is great. HotBot also has a text-only version here:
..
http://www.hotbot.com/text/
However, it does have ads. (Interestingly enough, the ad I got was for CodeWarrior/LINUX)
The help page (http://www.google.com/help.html) says that they do support the NOT (-) operator. Google also supports "" for word adjacency (although not for literal text search).
Um, there's only ONE line of Javascript, and
that's on the home page, to set the focus
to the search box. JavaScript is not required, nor is it extensively used.
Google's algorithm is simpler than the one described in Scientific American. The Clever project marks certain pages (authorities) as having _content_ and other pages (hubs) as having links to good pages. Content doesn't necessarily have links to good pages, and good pages don't necessarily have content. Google treats everything the same, so in theory it's not as good. Still, since the IBM folk don't have anything available for us to try it's hard to compare.
There's an algorithm called D* that has been proved optimal for things like fog of war (where "optimal" means it best used the available information, without trying to guess and getting lucky). However I don't know of anything that's proved optimal for enemy movements.
Um, they have several Sherlock plugins listed in the "More Google..." link. (See http://www.google.com/defaults.html) They just don't advertise it on their front page. If they advertised everything they have on the front page, the people in this forum would be complaining about how cluttered the interface is. ;-)
Amit
I would have to agree ... writing games isn't so different from writing some other program; you just use different libraries. Learn a programming language and how to write programs. Learn the libraries you might want to use.
Please don't give me a "Game programming" book that introduces me to C and Windows and how to use a joystick. Give me a book that talks about game design -- what makes a game fun? What data structures and algorithms do games typically use? Why would you choose 2D over 3D or vice versa? What kinds of games are better as single-player? How do you write decent game AI?
Notes:
:( Things seem a little better now.
Google has had trouble with their service provider over the last week.
Text-only AltaVista won't give you the refinement suggestions, which I think are really neat. For example, searching for "Explorer" gives you "Ford Explorer" and "Internet Explorer" as suggested refinements.
There's also a text-only HotBot at:
http://www.hotbot.com/lite/
Amit
Hey, there are /. readers using OS/2 :-)
:-( (I have bash, emacs, pgcc, python, XFree86, tf, and plenty of other "unix" stuff for OS/2, but not XEmacs. Argh!)
;-)
I mostly use Linux now, but I still boot into OS/2 a few times a week. I still like the OS/2 shell (Workplace Shell) much better than GNOME or KDE's desktop. I like OS/2 Communicator better than Linux Communicator or Navigator (especially the "search history" feature, which seems to be completely absent in the Linux version).
The main reason I use Linux is that I like XEmacs much better than normal FSF Emacs, and in OS/2 I only have FSF Emacs.
I guess I can blame Jamie Zawinski for getting me to switch to Linux. I bet he hates that.
- Amit
As long as exception handling is turned off (-fno-exceptions), compiling C code with a C++ compiler should give you the same level of efficiency.
The problem is that C++ isn't a strict superset of C. There are some things you can do in C (but shouldn't in new code) that aren't legal C++.
I too have noticed that programs are larger with egcs. However, it's not egcs's fault! It seems to be some quirk with egcs/gcc coexistence.
.. it made my executables shrink a LOT, even though the C++ library shouldn't really affect my C code.
Try compiling your C code with -lstdc++
- Amit
By the way, Google automatically puts + in front of every word, so you just search for GCC Oberon and you don't need +GCC +Oberon.
Yeah, telnet is the right interface for doors .. not really web. However, there's a web version of SRE here:
/. can host some games.
http://www.fastlane.net/~gpwossum/ii.shtml
Maybe
- Amit
Okay, this is off topic, but if you're bored and
want to have some fun, use autorpm to download 100 megs of RawHide updates and then type:
rpm -Uvh *.rpm
After working out a few minor glitches, it worked for me. Whee, what fun!