As much as I enjoy a good laugh, the predictable "Funny" posts on/. starting waring thin about a decade ago. Folks want to be modded up and it's much easier to rattle off a joke than an "Insightful" or "Informative" comment. It's also much faster to write a one line joke than something more substantial. Since the surest way to get modded up is to be one of the first few posts, the optimum strategy if one wishes to be modded up is to write a joke quickly before even reading TFA... a perverse incentive if ever I saw one.
There is an option on the comment settings page http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm that lets one set modifiers for each quality of comment. I set all "Funny" posts to -6 long ago and now the comments are the best part of/.
When I was a kid my mother taught me my first lesson in programming a computer. Back then they used to have these books that has the source code to simple BASIC games printed in them. She said that the secret to successful programing is in typing the program exactly as printed in the book, otherwise it might not work. Of course, I soon noticed that some typos didn't break the program... they just made it do something different. In time I was writing my own programs by recycling and recombining elements from these programs while still thinking of them as somewhat magical. I think this basic approach is quite sound as it parallels the way we learn natural language. We mimic others and learn in a very stimulus-response oriented way.
I would suggested to anyone wishing to learn programming that they start by taking an available opensource program and learn the steps needed to build it from source. Then experiment with tweaking the source and seeing if it will still build/run. Games are perfect for this because the the bug/feature distinction can be very arbitrary.
If a beginner is determined to write programs from scratch, I would recommend learning basic HTML and then PHP. It's relatively easy to write programs that do interesting things in just a few lines with PHP. Also, writing for the web lets you rely on the browser for I/O which spares the beginner a lot of tedium. PHP, like BASIC, may not be the most robust language, but I think that may actually make it a better language for a beginner. It takes years to learn programming anyway, so why not start with something easy?
Yeah it's really dumb. It always seemed to be that someone capable of
making a java applet for this should at least know enough
html/javascript to not need it. There must be some wysiwyg page
editor out there that is making these awful java rollovers.
I neglected to mention that my preferred WM is ratpoison. So not only do
I get a dozen obnoxious popups, but they all run
fullscreen!!! Awful... Just awful.
Apparently it's a problem with using Konquerer outside of KDE, so I'm guessing this will not be fixed. It's a shame too, because Konqueror is just a nice browser. I'm particularly fond of how easy it is to configure the keybindings/control layout. Konqueror is the only reason I ever install the KDE libraries. I wish the KDE folks cared more about making their apps work independently. Well designed X apps should work under any standards compliant window manager. I think that their strict focus on making one big, unified environment is somewhat myopic. It's really not in keeping with basic unix design standards.
Does this mean java applets will actually appear in the page like they're supposed to instead of popping up in a separate window? I hate it when I go to a (poorly designed) page in Konqueror that uses a bunch of java applets for button rollovers... I end up with a dozen little windows all over my screen.
That this still hadn't been fixed by Konqueror 3.3 is what finally got me to switch to Opera.
All the level designers I've known also did (or still do) game QA as well. It's quite a bit easier to get regular work in QA. There's just not much demand for level designers with no industry experience. Having a job in the same industry will at least keep you in contact with
people who might hire you to do level design... and it should keep you from flipping burgers most of the year.
On that note... if you actually like to play video games consider a different industry. I used to enjoy games on my own time, but
working with them ruined that for me. Now, when I play a game, I can hardly have fun... I just see bugs and bad design.
You see, you haven't really beaten a game until you can crash it reproducibly.
Building it all yourself is good.
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is the time spent compiling things from scratch really an issue for most folks anymore? I have a "puny" 1.2GHz, and a complete bootstrap and build of everything I use only takes a few hours. Day-to-day builds of new stuff I want usually only take a few minutes.
For me, the advantages of compiling everything from scratch justify the investment in compile time. If I can get a piece of software to build on the same machine that I intend to run it on, I've found that I have far fewer problems overall. Most potential problems get caught at compile time. This is what kept me using FreeBSD/OpenBSD for years.
Now that I've been using Gentoo for about a year, I've come to believe that this is 90% of what made the BSDs better than any linux distro I'd used back in 1999. If you want a program you build it... it's built for your architecture, with your optimization settings, exactly the way you want it. If the program you want isn't in ports/portage, you can usually add it yourself by changing a couple lines in an existing port. If the developer updates the source to a program without changing the build process too much, you can just rebuild. No need to hunt down rpms or debs.
Because you're building your own binaries, you're also afforded some small amount of protection from scripted security exploits that target known builds of programs... but that's another subject.
==Paracetamol (aka acetaminopren / tylenol)
Dosage: 15+ grammes, 20+ is better
Time: 10 hours fatal damage, but 2 weeks to actually die
Available: easy to get hold of
Certainty: fairly reliable
Notes: Once 10-12 hours is up, you've had it, but you still live for
a week or two after that. Probably better to wait 15 hours just to
make sure. Horrible side effects during this time (some of which are:
acute toxic hepatitis, renal failure, cerebral oedema, intra-abdominal
bleeding, aspiration pneumonia, haemophilia). Too small dose causes
severe liver damage. Accidental deaths are very common. There are few
if any side effects before the damage becomes fatal; occasionally
vomitting and nausea.
As long as one can grow as old as he wishies without seeing life as "a curse" then why bother dying?
If you ever get sick of living, there'll always be a way out.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I enjoy a good laugh, the predictable "Funny" posts on /. starting waring thin about a decade ago. Folks want to be modded up and it's much easier to rattle off a joke than an "Insightful" or "Informative" comment. It's also much faster to write a one line joke than something more substantial. Since the surest way to get modded up is to be one of the first few posts, the optimum strategy if one wishes to be modded up is to write a joke quickly before even reading TFA... a perverse incentive if ever I saw one.
There is an option on the comment settings page http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm that lets one set modifiers for each quality of comment. I set all "Funny" posts to -6 long ago and now the comments are the best part of /.
When I was a kid my mother taught me my first lesson in programming a computer. Back then they used to have these books that has the source code to simple BASIC games printed in them. She said that the secret to successful programing is in typing the program exactly as printed in the book, otherwise it might not work. Of course, I soon noticed that some typos didn't break the program... they just made it do something different. In time I was writing my own programs by recycling and recombining elements from these programs while still thinking of them as somewhat magical. I think this basic approach is quite sound as it parallels the way we learn natural language. We mimic others and learn in a very stimulus-response oriented way.
I would suggested to anyone wishing to learn programming that they start by taking an available opensource program and learn the steps needed to build it from source. Then experiment with tweaking the source and seeing if it will still build/run. Games are perfect for this because the the bug/feature distinction can be very arbitrary.
If a beginner is determined to write programs from scratch, I would recommend learning basic HTML and then PHP. It's relatively easy to write programs that do interesting things in just a few lines with PHP. Also, writing for the web lets you rely on the browser for I/O which spares the beginner a lot of tedium. PHP, like BASIC, may not be the most robust language, but I think that may actually make it a better language for a beginner. It takes years to learn programming anyway, so why not start with something easy?
I neglected to mention that my preferred WM is ratpoison. So not only do I get a dozen obnoxious popups, but they all run fullscreen!!! Awful... Just awful.
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13635
Apparently it's a problem with using Konquerer outside of KDE, so I'm guessing this will not be fixed. It's a shame too, because Konqueror is just a nice browser. I'm particularly fond of how easy it is to configure the keybindings/control layout. Konqueror is the only reason I ever install the KDE libraries. I wish the KDE folks cared more about making their apps work independently. Well designed X apps should work under any standards compliant window manager. I think that their strict focus on making one big, unified environment is somewhat myopic. It's really not in keeping with basic unix design standards.
Does this mean java applets will actually appear in the page like they're supposed to instead of popping up in a separate window? I hate it when I go to a (poorly designed) page in Konqueror that uses a bunch of java applets for button rollovers... I end up with a dozen little windows all over my screen. That this still hadn't been fixed by Konqueror 3.3 is what finally got me to switch to Opera.
On that note... if you actually like to play video games consider a different industry. I used to enjoy games on my own time, but working with them ruined that for me. Now, when I play a game, I can hardly have fun... I just see bugs and bad design.
You see, you haven't really beaten a game until you can crash it reproducibly.
For me, the advantages of compiling everything from scratch justify the investment in compile time. If I can get a piece of software to build on the same machine that I intend to run it on, I've found that I have far fewer problems overall. Most potential problems get caught at compile time. This is what kept me using FreeBSD/OpenBSD for years.
Now that I've been using Gentoo for about a year, I've come to believe that this is 90% of what made the BSDs better than any linux distro I'd used back in 1999. If you want a program you build it... it's built for your architecture, with your optimization settings, exactly the way you want it. If the program you want isn't in ports/portage, you can usually add it yourself by changing a couple lines in an existing port. If the developer updates the source to a program without changing the build process too much, you can just rebuild. No need to hunt down rpms or debs.
Because you're building your own binaries, you're also afforded some small amount of protection from scripted security exploits that target known builds of programs... but that's another subject.
==Paracetamol (aka acetaminopren / tylenol)
Dosage: 15+ grammes, 20+ is better
Time: 10 hours fatal damage, but 2 weeks to actually die
Available: easy to get hold of
Certainty: fairly reliable
Notes: Once 10-12 hours is up, you've had it, but you still live for a week or two after that. Probably better to wait 15 hours just to make sure. Horrible side effects during this time (some of which are: acute toxic hepatitis, renal failure, cerebral oedema, intra-abdominal bleeding, aspiration pneumonia, haemophilia). Too small dose causes severe liver damage. Accidental deaths are very common. There are few if any side effects before the damage becomes fatal; occasionally vomitting and nausea.
As long as one can grow as old as he wishies without seeing life as "a curse" then why bother dying? If you ever get sick of living, there'll always be a way out.