30 secs is not "that often", but "that fast". Since I disabled every service I don't need, the hard disk rarely spins up now; when it does, it's a batch of activity (usually svn commit or svn checkout) and then it remains unused for several hours more. The 30 seconds rule (I have it at 1 minute, actually) makes it spin down quickly after I used it, not spin down every minute.
I've recently went through this, but not for a laptop, but a Pentium 100 with 64 MB, running FC3 acting as an ADSL router and Subversion server (!).
Essentially I activated the "laptop mode" kernel variable (/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode or similar), set the hard drives to spin down after 30 seconds using hdparm, killed all the unneeded services, and cleaned up the crontab; sa in particular was causing the hard disks to spin up every 10 minutes, which I wanted to avoid. This took me a while to figure out.
Now I have a very silent, very cool (as in temperature) "server".
Oh, they are, it's their tendency to believe ridiculous things, and the fact that people want these ridiculous things taught as truth, what worries me.
As for The Truth... I don't claim science currently has The Truth. I don't know if it ever will. However there are things that we (as in "mankind") should have already accepted as Not The Truth a long, long time ago. Take astrology, for example. Maybe it made sense millenia ago when people thought stars were painted somewhere and the "figures" actually were there. Now we know that if we travel a couple hundred light years in some direction, these figures distort, so there are no constellations. How is it possible that some people still believe in horoscopes? Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
Welcome to the Second Dark Ages. The first time it happened about 1500 years ago it was probably accidental. This time ignorance appears to be fashionable:(
A fellow indie game developer, initially from France, sold all he had and relocated to Thailand, where he now lives and works. Apparently it worked for him. The pictures are awesome!
I live in and work from Uruguay, South America; my situation is different to yours since I didn't move from the US, but yes, it's very possible to do first-world business from a third-world country. We've been doing it successfully since late 2002.
It depends on what do you want to do, of course. If you're a freelancer or independent software developer and can work from home in the US, you can probably work from home anywhere else. Thanks to Skype talking to your US contacts is free (512/128 ADSL costs ~USD 50 here - somewhat slow and somewhat expensive but does the job)
You can toss together a Bewjeweled-like game in a week, plus spend another few weeks polishing it up.
Oh yes, that's what everyone thinks before actually trying to make one. Just go ahead, make a Bejewelled-like game with a comparable quality in a few weeks. You'll soon be wondering where did all these months go.
As an experiment, take a look at our games, and try to guess what the development times were.
Nothing wrong, and it would be much better in the long term, but it can get difficult if you go against the policies of the university. For a young and relatively new guy as myself, at least.
I agree completely. But the "don't pass based on the effort" policy must be honored by the whole university. I get 6th semester students and I'm supposed to teach them Computer Graphics. But when the difficulties of the students aren't related to CG itself but to programming or other prerequisite knowledge, how am I supposed to evaluate them? If I decide to be strict, very few people would pass. On the other hand, if I acknowledge their lack of fundamentals and am more lenient, I'm perpetuating the problem. Often it's a delicate balance, unfortunately.
AND lower 4 bits (0x0F), add to '0' or 'A' - 10, shift 4 bits right, repeat. Then use reverse_string();) I can't say I'm surprised by what you say though. My students (Computer Graphics, 6th semester of the 10-semester degree) have some trouble with relatively simple things, and I'm sure most of them couldn't even understand the question.
Funniest moment ever : after the texture mapping lecture I gave them an assignment to read a texture from a raw file, explaining that each component of the RGB triplets is one byte, and the texels are ordered left to right, bottom to top. Someone posts to the mailing list complaining that he opened the raw file in Notepad but couldn't figure it out, "it only has a lot of weird symbols".
I thought it was a problem with our university, or with our country, though. The problem is more widespread than I believed:\
Amen to that. I loved Colonization, and I'd love to see it open sourced, ported to Linux, and made multiplayer. What the hell, I'd do the port myself if nobody else does, as I'd love to port a lot of older games to Linux just for the fun of it. The Dark Sun series and the Twinsen series come to mind. These are among a few games that deserve to be played nowadays even if they look outdated.
That probably depends on what are your goals. If you want to get a job in the industry as a level designer or modeler or something, I think a mod is the way to go. If you want to make your own games and go indie, make your own game:)
I was using a 2.4 kernel and some nVidia drivers. I upgraded to Fedora Core 3, which had the 2.6.9 kernel I believe. Configuring the nVidia drivers was a nightmare, I ended up using an unofficial version patched by someone, version 6111 I think.
The first thing I noticed with 2.6 is that something changed for the worse in memory management - closing programs which eat up a lot of RAM make the system completely unresponsive for several seconds. Then I started getting crashes (kernel oops) when doing OpenGL development (but, for some reason, not while using OpenGL intensive games such as Enemy Territory).
What I finally got to work is kernel 2.6.12 (from FC3 updates) and nVidia driver 7676. The slowness when deallocating lots of memory is still there though.
1) Making games of that quality is a lot harder than you think it is. A "simple" game like that can take a 3 or 4 person team a whole six months, not 2. You'd be surprised to know the time it took us to make some of our games (see sig)
2) Selling 3200 copies of a game is a lot harder than you think it is. A game that sells 100 copies a month from your site is considered successful. Sure you can sell a lot more copies if you associate with the big casual game portals (RealArcade, Yahoo Games and the like) but you'll get less than 30% of the net sales if you're a first-time developer.
Not natively, but a lot of people are very fluent with english as a second language. Not everyone, but I'd say almost everyone in IT and tech related fields. In Uruguay, at least.
I use PowWeb for the Mystery Studio site (see sig), $7.77 a month, 3000 GB/month, no big problems in the 2.5 years I'm hosted with them. http://www.powweb.com./ No, I don't work for them, and I won't get a comission.
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I forgot another trick to avoid useless hard disk spinups : remount your filesystems with the noatime option.
I meant sysstat (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/). The log directory is /var/log/sa. Sorry for the confusion.
30 secs is not "that often", but "that fast". Since I disabled every service I don't need, the hard disk rarely spins up now; when it does, it's a batch of activity (usually svn commit or svn checkout) and then it remains unused for several hours more. The 30 seconds rule (I have it at 1 minute, actually) makes it spin down quickly after I used it, not spin down every minute.
I've recently went through this, but not for a laptop, but a Pentium 100 with 64 MB, running FC3 acting as an ADSL router and Subversion server (!).
Essentially I activated the "laptop mode" kernel variable (/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode or similar), set the hard drives to spin down after 30 seconds using hdparm, killed all the unneeded services, and cleaned up the crontab; sa in particular was causing the hard disks to spin up every 10 minutes, which I wanted to avoid. This took me a while to figure out.
Now I have a very silent, very cool (as in temperature) "server".
Oh, they are, it's their tendency to believe ridiculous things, and the fact that people want these ridiculous things taught as truth, what worries me.
As for The Truth... I don't claim science currently has The Truth. I don't know if it ever will. However there are things that we (as in "mankind") should have already accepted as Not The Truth a long, long time ago. Take astrology, for example. Maybe it made sense millenia ago when people thought stars were painted somewhere and the "figures" actually were there. Now we know that if we travel a couple hundred light years in some direction, these figures distort, so there are no constellations. How is it possible that some people still believe in horoscopes? Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
Welcome to the Second Dark Ages. The first time it happened about 1500 years ago it was probably accidental. This time ignorance appears to be fashionable :(
It's "sehks", dummy.
A real geek knows that Eric Raymond is ESR, not ERS.
A fellow indie game developer, initially from France, sold all he had and relocated to Thailand, where he now lives and works. Apparently it worked for him. The pictures are awesome!
I live in and work from Uruguay, South America; my situation is different to yours since I didn't move from the US, but yes, it's very possible to do first-world business from a third-world country. We've been doing it successfully since late 2002.
It depends on what do you want to do, of course. If you're a freelancer or independent software developer and can work from home in the US, you can probably work from home anywhere else. Thanks to Skype talking to your US contacts is free (512/128 ADSL costs ~USD 50 here - somewhat slow and somewhat expensive but does the job)
...you know what that sound is :)
...how many times did the founder edit his biography?
Wow! I, for one, actually live in Uruguay, so I'll be sure to welcome our new hole-drilling samurai overlords!
And you've made an inspiring display of "spalling" :)
Definately!
You can toss together a Bewjeweled-like game in a week, plus spend another few weeks polishing it up.
Oh yes, that's what everyone thinks before actually trying to make one. Just go ahead, make a Bejewelled-like game with a comparable quality in a few weeks. You'll soon be wondering where did all these months go.
As an experiment, take a look at our games, and try to guess what the development times were.
Nothing wrong, and it would be much better in the long term, but it can get difficult if you go against the policies of the university. For a young and relatively new guy as myself, at least.
I agree completely. But the "don't pass based on the effort" policy must be honored by the whole university. I get 6th semester students and I'm supposed to teach them Computer Graphics. But when the difficulties of the students aren't related to CG itself but to programming or other prerequisite knowledge, how am I supposed to evaluate them? If I decide to be strict, very few people would pass. On the other hand, if I acknowledge their lack of fundamentals and am more lenient, I'm perpetuating the problem. Often it's a delicate balance, unfortunately.
AND lower 4 bits (0x0F), add to '0' or 'A' - 10, shift 4 bits right, repeat. Then use reverse_string() ;) I can't say I'm surprised by what you say though. My students (Computer Graphics, 6th semester of the 10-semester degree) have some trouble with relatively simple things, and I'm sure most of them couldn't even understand the question.
:\
Funniest moment ever : after the texture mapping lecture I gave them an assignment to read a texture from a raw file, explaining that each component of the RGB triplets is one byte, and the texels are ordered left to right, bottom to top. Someone posts to the mailing list complaining that he opened the raw file in Notepad but couldn't figure it out, "it only has a lot of weird symbols".
I thought it was a problem with our university, or with our country, though. The problem is more widespread than I believed
I'd say it's more like "amasing"... really, typos are not that "amuzing".
Amen to that. I loved Colonization, and I'd love to see it open sourced, ported to Linux, and made multiplayer. What the hell, I'd do the port myself if nobody else does, as I'd love to port a lot of older games to Linux just for the fun of it. The Dark Sun series and the Twinsen series come to mind. These are among a few games that deserve to be played nowadays even if they look outdated.
That probably depends on what are your goals. If you want to get a job in the industry as a level designer or modeler or something, I think a mod is the way to go. If you want to make your own games and go indie, make your own game :)
I was using a 2.4 kernel and some nVidia drivers. I upgraded to Fedora Core 3, which had the 2.6.9 kernel I believe. Configuring the nVidia drivers was a nightmare, I ended up using an unofficial version patched by someone, version 6111 I think.
The first thing I noticed with 2.6 is that something changed for the worse in memory management - closing programs which eat up a lot of RAM make the system completely unresponsive for several seconds. Then I started getting crashes (kernel oops) when doing OpenGL development (but, for some reason, not while using OpenGL intensive games such as Enemy Territory).
What I finally got to work is kernel 2.6.12 (from FC3 updates) and nVidia driver 7676. The slowness when deallocating lots of memory is still there though.
A couple of mistakes with your reasoning :
1) Making games of that quality is a lot harder than you think it is. A "simple" game like that can take a 3 or 4 person team a whole six months, not 2. You'd be surprised to know the time it took us to make some of our games (see sig)
2) Selling 3200 copies of a game is a lot harder than you think it is. A game that sells 100 copies a month from your site is considered successful. Sure you can sell a lot more copies if you associate with the big casual game portals (RealArcade, Yahoo Games and the like) but you'll get less than 30% of the net sales if you're a first-time developer.
Not natively, but a lot of people are very fluent with english as a second language. Not everyone, but I'd say almost everyone in IT and tech related fields. In Uruguay, at least.
I use PowWeb for the Mystery Studio site (see sig), $7.77 a month, 3000 GB/month, no big problems in the 2.5 years I'm hosted with them. http://www.powweb.com./ No, I don't work for them, and I won't get a comission.