Not all of us indie game developers are trying to "make it big" or even "make money". I'm content to write free, simple games as a hobby. The GarageGames model of "sell your game (and give us money)" isn't the only or best way to go, I don't think.
Oddly enough, in my experience the quality of the average "shareware" or "try-and-buy" game or utility is a fair bit lower than the quality of the average freeware equivalent (go look at the shareware photo editors on download.com, then look at GIMP). Somehow I think a different crowd is attracted to the goal of "selling my software", as opposed to "developing some real good software".
I might have gone to the conference if it was a little closer, but I don't know that it's going to be what people are expecting. I worry that it's going to be a mess of people trying to sell their games. This might be fun as a consumer, but it's not exactly educational, edifying or likely to really build the indie developer community.
So we asked some basic Unix questions and a bunch of general CS questions.
Certainly as a manager you need to know what skills your guy is really going to need, and whether this guy has these skills (or is going to be able to pick them up in a reasonable time). I'm only suggesting this:
For a lot of programming positions, many applicants will be overqualified technically - or at least able to get the job done in a reasonable way. In these cases, your best bet as a manager might not be to say "Which of these guys has the most technical knowledgge?" but instead "Which one of these guys is going to work hard, be willing to learn, be good to work with, etc..."
For lots of jobs this won't be the case. You'll need to verify specific technical skills.
..for the most part. Most programmers with some sort of qualification can get your jobs done, unless your jobs require some amazing degree of skill. I probably couldn't write you out a bug free Quicksort first try, but I could certainly implement it in a real project.
And to be honest, most projects don't require skills nearly that nebulous. How many projects today are: get the data off the screen, validate it, then create the invoice.
The bigger question is whether they'll actually work hard on their jobs, or just play on SlashDot all day. And I don't know how to interview for that (and obviously neither do my employers).
They paid more than they expected for Lunix, now they're distributing it for free to get back at that stupid manager who they thought meant $2.50 when he said two-fifty but really meant $250.
Always crapped out. We bought a little fan for ours, and it would still overheat in about an hour.
At the time, all the sprite stuff made no sense - I was just tampering with the sacred cryptic code out of the manual. It would be fun to go back, now that I have some ideas about what sorts of registers I'd be "POKE"ing data into.
You description is more what I remember, though I never did any "fancy ML" programming where I might have learned much about the internals.
The BASIC was good enough for me (I was 10). I spent hours calculating out two color sprites on graph paper. I think games are too good and too plentiful these days - kids just don't seem to have the same drive to learn programming (or even what's going on behind the icons).
which meant load the first file on the disk - which usually also had an autorun. In fact, I still sometimes hit shift-2 to do quotation marks.
LOAD "$",8
Was the typical command to get the list of files on a disk. LIST displayed the currently entered BASIC file (as the normal shell doubled as a BASIC editor).
We have a "front-page" server. That server randomizes links to
server1.poop.ca server2.poop.ca server3.poop.c a
etc... If we need to take a server down, we just reroute its traffic to another server (and we usually have a free one).
I suppose this doesn't help if you've got too much front page traffic for one server, nor is it a perfect solution in any case. But it's really easy to implement, and works just fine for us.
You're of course correct in that the computer cannot make up for a player who can't follow its directions.
However, comparing that to computers playing chess seems a little silly. Computers don't lose at chess because somehow they meant to move the queen but instead moved the rook. In any case, computers will be destroying humans at chess in 10 years.
I can certainly imagine a computer that's better at "the mental part" of pool than any human - and that's what the article is talking about (and this is apparent from the quote)...
Jebara is confident that it will be able to judge the table-top situation more accurately and precisely than the human mind..
Who cares? There's a bug somewhere and somebody should fix it (and I'm sure people already have).
I can't imagine there is much mention of a maximum font size in the X standard. At most there's probably some mention of suggested behavior under low memory. I can't imagine the standard would have prescribed behavior for font size that XFree86 wouldn't have followed. Thus my assumption that there wasn't anything specific in the standard. But thanks for the pedantry.
And I'm pretty sure you won't actually go look in the standard before commenting. That's a lot of work, and I'm guessing you're as lazy as I am.
There's really 2 good options:
1. Cap the font size in Mozilla. 2. Have XFree86 handle low memory a little more gracefully.
My entire point was that the 1st one should be trivial to implement - and I'm surprised that SlashDot doesn't see tons of this sort of patch work (even if in this case it wasn't really necessary). In fact, I seldom see source up at all on Slash. I would be interested to see the source behind lots of these stories.
Is made out of leather, wood, and cotton (and some little metal bits, but not a significant amount).
Am I an enviro-God?
Are couches really the pinnacle of achievement in terms of bio-safety? Wouldn't a naturally produced, biodegradable television be a little more impressive?
I'm not aware of any surveys, but I'm sure the desire to write games is pretty common among programmers. 5/5 of the ones who work here...
Many of us are young males who were introduced to computing via games. At university, anyone who was really into programming was writing a little game... I think it's pretty natural.
Almost all of her songs are available free on MP3.com. But if you're like me, you'll need the somewhat higher quality CD's. Too bad no LP's, far as I can tell.
A: Go get a degree/certificate/internet-school-honorary-napkin . You can then go cold-apply for a job programming.
B: Talk to your uncle who works at that place that makes those things. Maybe he knows somebody who needs a programmer. If you're serious about finding a job, this may be your best bet - but you'll need to swallow some pride in order to ask the people you know (and often don't know that well) for help. Your chances may be better than you think - a good word from your old Scout leader may be better than a degree. And once you've got something on your resume, you may have more like cold-applying.
Perhaps there's some special property of the bionic man noise that disables helicopter motion - he was just pulling really hard so as to activate the noise.
I do love scenes like that, though, where physics is really pooped upon. Perhaps if Austin made a particularly large bionic noise, he could lift himself up by pulling on his shoelaces.
I finally found the noise on Kazaa Lite a while ago. Now I use it all the time - like when I hand things to people in my office. Makes everything more impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all of us indie game developers are trying to "make it big" or even "make money". I'm content to write free, simple games as a hobby. The GarageGames model of "sell your game (and give us money)" isn't the only or best way to go, I don't think.
Oddly enough, in my experience the quality of the average "shareware" or "try-and-buy" game or utility is a fair bit lower than the quality of the average freeware equivalent (go look at the shareware photo editors on download.com, then look at GIMP). Somehow I think a different crowd is attracted to the goal of "selling my software", as opposed to "developing some real good software".
I might have gone to the conference if it was a little closer, but I don't know that it's going to be what people are expecting. I worry that it's going to be a mess of people trying to sell their games. This might be fun as a consumer, but it's not exactly educational, edifying or likely to really build the indie developer community.
So we asked some basic Unix questions and a bunch of general CS questions.
Certainly as a manager you need to know what skills your guy is really going to need, and whether this guy has these skills (or is going to be able to pick them up in a reasonable time). I'm only suggesting this:
For a lot of programming positions, many applicants will be overqualified technically - or at least able to get the job done in a reasonable way. In these cases, your best bet as a manager might not be to say "Which of these guys has the most technical knowledgge?" but instead "Which one of these guys is going to work hard, be willing to learn, be good to work with, etc..."
For lots of jobs this won't be the case. You'll need to verify specific technical skills.
..for the most part. Most programmers with some sort of qualification can get your jobs done, unless your jobs require some amazing degree of skill. I probably couldn't write you out a bug free Quicksort first try, but I could certainly implement it in a real project.
And to be honest, most projects don't require skills nearly that nebulous. How many projects today are: get the data off the screen, validate it, then create the invoice.
The bigger question is whether they'll actually work hard on their jobs, or just play on SlashDot all day. And I don't know how to interview for that (and obviously neither do my employers).
.
They paid more than they expected for Lunix, now they're distributing it for free to get back at that stupid manager who they thought meant $2.50 when he said two-fifty but really meant $250.
Forward this on!
.
But as long as there's still one Plankton, we'll all have to keep watch over our Krabbie Patties.
Yeah, but notepad is unusable on NT4.
Ctrl-F find? Doesn't work.
Ctrl-S save? Doesn't work.
Ctrl-B bold? Just joking.
Seriously, though, it's not like there's a lot of "notepad skillz" to be transferring around. That said, I end up using notepad a fair bit.
Always crapped out. We bought a little fan for ours, and it would still overheat in about an hour.
At the time, all the sprite stuff made no sense - I was just tampering with the sacred cryptic code out of the manual. It would be fun to go back, now that I have some ideas about what sorts of registers I'd be "POKE"ing data into.
You description is more what I remember, though I never did any "fancy ML" programming where I might have learned much about the internals.
The BASIC was good enough for me (I was 10). I spent hours calculating out two color sprites on graph paper. I think games are too good and too plentiful these days - kids just don't seem to have the same drive to learn programming (or even what's going on behind the icons).
The command would have been
LOAD "*",8,1
which meant load the first file on the disk - which usually also had an autorun. In fact, I still sometimes hit shift-2 to do quotation marks.
LOAD "$",8
Was the typical command to get the list of files on a disk. LIST displayed the currently entered BASIC file (as the normal shell doubled as a BASIC editor).
Great machine, that.
When converting to meters per second from meters per hour, you'll want to divide by 3600, not times by 3600.
Just in case you weren't joking, I thought I'd clear that up...
Is a breakdown of how each company's base is growing.
How much comes from switching from another product?
How much comes from new domains starting up?
How much comes from existing domains adding servers?
We have a "front-page" server. That server randomizes links to
c a
server1.poop.ca
server2.poop.ca
server3.poop.
etc... If we need to take a server down, we just reroute its traffic to another server (and we usually have a free one).
I suppose this doesn't help if you've got too much front page traffic for one server, nor is it a perfect solution in any case. But it's really easy to implement, and works just fine for us.
You're of course correct in that the computer cannot make up for a player who can't follow its directions.
.
However, comparing that to computers playing chess seems a little silly. Computers don't lose at chess because somehow they meant to move the queen but instead moved the rook. In any case, computers will be destroying humans at chess in 10 years.
I can certainly imagine a computer that's better at "the mental part" of pool than any human - and that's what the article is talking about (and this is apparent from the quote)...
Jebara is confident that it will be able to judge the table-top situation more accurately and precisely than the human mind.
.
Who cares? There's a bug somewhere and somebody should fix it (and I'm sure people already have).
I can't imagine there is much mention of a maximum font size in the X standard. At most there's probably some mention of suggested behavior under low memory. I can't imagine the standard would have prescribed behavior for font size that XFree86 wouldn't have followed. Thus my assumption that there wasn't anything specific in the standard. But thanks for the pedantry.
And I'm pretty sure you won't actually go look in the standard before commenting. That's a lot of work, and I'm guessing you're as lazy as I am.
There's really 2 good options:
1. Cap the font size in Mozilla.
2. Have XFree86 handle low memory a little more gracefully.
My entire point was that the 1st one should be trivial to implement - and I'm surprised that SlashDot doesn't see tons of this sort of patch work (even if in this case it wasn't really necessary). In fact, I seldom see source up at all on Slash. I would be interested to see the source behind lots of these stories.
Why should a person who want an enormous "A" for a poster in Gimp, and who have plenty of virtual memory suffer because of an arbitrary limit?
Then put the cap code in Mozilla... Anybody need a letter "Q" that's 10 times the size of your screen? If you do, why are you drawing it with Mozilla?
I don't know if X11 is designed to be robust in the case of unreasonable demands from the clients.
Apparently it's not.
.
How come nobody is posting a quick source patch? WTF? Isn't that one of the great things about open source?
You have all the code. It shouldn't be too hard to find the few places that you need to cap font size.
Where's all the programmers?
if(iFontRenderSize>FONT_MAX_SIZE){
iFontRenderSize=FONT_MAX_SIZE;
Tokyo.Stomp.Stomp.Stomp();
}
Is made out of leather, wood, and cotton (and some little metal bits, but not a significant amount).
Am I an enviro-God?
Are couches really the pinnacle of achievement in terms of bio-safety? Wouldn't a naturally produced, biodegradable television be a little more impressive?
The big goal isn't the government using good software, it's hurting MS.
Yeah. I can't believe MS is willing to compromise passenger safety just to make a few bucks.
When will they learn?
I'm not aware of any surveys, but I'm sure the desire to write games is pretty common among programmers. 5/5 of the ones who work here...
Many of us are young males who were introduced to computing via games. At university, anyone who was really into programming was writing a little game... I think it's pretty natural.
.
It's here...
Almost all of her songs are available free on MP3.com. But if you're like me, you'll need the somewhat higher quality CD's. Too bad no LP's, far as I can tell.
.
You can either:
n . You can then go cold-apply for a job programming.
A: Go get a degree/certificate/internet-school-honorary-napki
B: Talk to your uncle who works at that place that makes those things. Maybe he knows somebody who needs a programmer. If you're serious about finding a job, this may be your best bet - but you'll need to swallow some pride in order to ask the people you know (and often don't know that well) for help. Your chances may be better than you think - a good word from your old Scout leader may be better than a degree. And once you've got something on your resume, you may have more like cold-applying.
Good luck!
.
This article is pretty funny.
And not only does it have links to the bionic noise, but also to the elusive "bionic eye noise" which you may have forgotten.
.
Perhaps there's some special property of the bionic man noise that disables helicopter motion - he was just pulling really hard so as to activate the noise.
I do love scenes like that, though, where physics is really pooped upon. Perhaps if Austin made a particularly large bionic noise, he could lift himself up by pulling on his shoelaces.
I finally found the noise on Kazaa Lite a while ago. Now I use it all the time - like when I hand things to people in my office. Makes everything more impressive.
.