Carmack left school after two semesters to work as a freelance programmer. I don't think he made it to Numerical Methods or the equivalent. That makes this code all that much more impressive.
I for one would like a "don't download any more crap, I just want to play the game" button.
I'm not in Windows right now, but right-click on Half-Life 2 and select 'do not automatically update game', or something like that?;-)
I got all excited then, and went to try it. But currently I'm waiting for the 'Updating Steam platform' dialog to go away before I can try it out...43% complete so far:-(
Have you actually used STEAM or are you just repeating stuff you have read elsewhere?
Now then. I play HL2 etc occasionally, and the only thing that really bugs me about Steam is that it seems like whenever I play HL2, Steam has to 'update' my game, which involves 10 minutes of waiting/dicking around while it downloads some more stuff.
It worked fine the last time I played, so why can't I just play the damn game? I for one would like a "don't download any more crap, I just want to play the game" button.
I particularly liked the way he bitched about the lack of the female assassin characters in Half-Life, and used this as his entire basis for mocking the ad, and then obviously got emailed by a hundred thousand gamers saying "Dude, did you even play the game?"
I can't imagine anyone who actually played that bit of HL to forget the ninjas - it wasn't like they were easy to kill. Most people's first encounter with them was accompanied by the words "What the hell was that?!", usually quickly followed by some kind of death.
I also like the whole post-modern uber-cool irony employed about how dumb and shallow marketing people are to use sex to sell ads, and then to say something like "That's an extraordinarily ugly woman."
And the bonus of a "John Romero's hair is like a girl's hair!" joke. Maybe the brief for this piece was that his jokes had to be of the same vintage as the adverts.
Or, you know, you could buy a plastic bag or something. Then the other 99.9% of us that use laptops don't have to pay for your backwards idea of an acceptable environment for a laptop.
5100 dots per line is 5100 x 11 x 600 dots per page, which is 33,660,000 dots, or about 32Mb when done monochrome, or 8.2Gb when done in only 8 bit (256 shade) colour.
Potential customers base their impressions on your office space.
And to see if there are people in your office. At the crazy part of the dotcom boom, some VCs developed a habit of always visiting the offices of companies they were considering, just to make sure they actually had employees.
Of course, this resulted in some companies hiring people to sit at desks for the days the VCs visited.
I always think of it as removing a decision I have to make from the otherwise possibly very complicated business of moving a 1 ton block of metal around in a place where soft squishy people might be. Light is red - I stop. End of story.
I feel the same way about safety margins. Sadly, too many people seem to think that safety margin means, e.g. "Ooh, I can get there a bit quicker/be a bit closer to that car, and it's still safe."
The best environment I've ever worked in was an office that was an old country house, and most offices had 2 people in them. A few had 3 people. It's probably still the most productive environment.
However, one of the reasons was that there was a communal kitchen (well, when I say kitchen, it was a sink/drink making facilities at the end of the corridor), and people used to go there for tea/coffee breaks at 11am and 3pm. And when I say those times, I mean we would do it religiously. There was no official time or anything, it just seemed to be a subconscious consensus (it sometimes reminded me of synchronisation of menstruation via pheromones, but only superficially:-)).
The important thing was, those coffee breaks would often last 30-40 minutes. To a manager, that seems like an awful lot of wasted time - 15 coders standing around chatting for an hour a day. But the important point was that was where/how we socialised, and how a lot of problems were solved. It probably saved a lot of time, because you had 15 smart people standing around hearing (mostly) about what everyone was working on that day, and the problems that had come up. Everyone knew what was going on in all the other sections of the project they were working on, and how things were going.
Interestingly, when a kitchen was opened upstairs (we were on two floors) the staff then split into two kitchen groups. The managers were upstairs (along with some of the coders), and the downstairs guys often complained that they were out of the loop, and didn't get to hear about everything they should have. So it's a tricky balance, but like I say, I've never been so productive. Other aspects of the company were less than ideal, but the physical working environment was pretty good.
I still can't believe I only drank 2 cups of tea a day while working there...that can't be right.
Re:If the review is accurate, the book is revision
on
In Search of Stupidity
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· Score: 1
I'd agree - I was around developing software at the time of OS/2 Warp, Win95 etc, and my general impression was that Windows 3.1x ownz0red the desktop. With OS/2, I always felt that IBM had to come up with a really good reason why you'd want to run it instead of Windows...and they never did (to be fair, I was running NT 3.1/3.5 around that time, so it was harder to convince me). It always seemed like a 'different' GUI rather than a better one. And the 'it runs all your Windows apps' adverts just made me think, "So does Windows...why do I want OS/2 again?"
And I'm a techie - if that was my opinion, it should be obvious why the general population went for whatever was the next version of Windows.
Hardlinks AND symlinks have been in NTFS forever, but because you can't create them through the GUI or the DOS prompt, most people don't knwo they exist. Shortcuts are very different from symlinks, as shortcuts are just a GUI thing. If a program is hard-coded to look for "C:\foo\bar.ini" you can't move bar.ini elsewhere and replace it with a shortcut, as bar.ini.lnk isn't helpful. You can replace it with a link, however.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up - I thought that NTFS supported symlinks for ages, too, but the article and comments seemed to suggest it was new, and I was only sure that I'd use hard-links before (I just download one of the hardlink command-line utilities/explorer context menus whenever I need to use links), so I assumed I was wrong about symlinks.
And yeah, shortcuts are quite sucky due to the.lnk thing.
Aliases should work via SMB, so long as you've still got the resource fork and are accessing it from another Mac. They don't work from Windows for obvious reasons -- Windows has never implemented a volume-ID to path resolution required systems, as is required by the alias structure.
I was using it from a Windows machine, but I was confused (and still am after your explanation), as to why aliases didn't work over SMB. You say it's 'obvious'. I thought an alias was a file system level object, from what I remembered when I read about them in 'Inside Macintosh'.
So, to me, it's irrelevant that Windows has never implemented a 'volume-ID to path resolution' system, as you're doing network sharing, so you already have a virtualisation layer present. If I use Windows to open a folder shared on a Mac via SMB, and that folder has an alias to another folder on the Mac, why doesn't that just appear as a standard folder via SMB? Isn't that the point of aliases? They 'just work', because they're low enough in the FS system to just work as files or folders? Obviously, if you want to, you can detect aliases (so, e.g. you don't back up the same folder twice in a backup program), but claiming it's the fault of the client machine or the network protocol seems a bit lame.
SMB supports files and folders, so aliases should 'just work', even over SMB. The fact that they don't seems to me to be the same failing as Vista is being berated for in this story.
You'd think they'd learn that people want a rectangular enter key, with a rectangular backslash/pipe key above it and a rectangular, full-width backspace key above that.
No thanks. Big enter key please, with a backspace above that, like just about every other computer keyboard I've used in my life.
Re:I'm not sure what you're getting at
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
Actually:-) on XP (SP2, anyway), it seems to default to the 'Optimise for quick removal' policy for thumb drives/card readers, which basically means you can unplug the device without using the safe removal icon.
(Right click on drive, choose Properties, go to Hardware tab, click Properties, then go to 'Policies' tab to change this.)
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA much?
Only sometimes
I'm not in Windows right now, but right-click on Half-Life 2 and select 'do not automatically update game', or something like that?
I got all excited then, and went to try it. But currently I'm waiting for the 'Updating Steam platform' dialog to go away before I can try it out...43% complete so far :-(
10. not download so much shit
Doesn't download anything you don't request.
Have you actually used STEAM or are you just repeating stuff you have read elsewhere?
Now then. I play HL2 etc occasionally, and the only thing that really bugs me about Steam is that it seems like whenever I play HL2, Steam has to 'update' my game, which involves 10 minutes of waiting/dicking around while it downloads some more stuff.
It worked fine the last time I played, so why can't I just play the damn game? I for one would like a "don't download any more crap, I just want to play the game" button.
I particularly liked the way he bitched about the lack of the female assassin characters in Half-Life, and used this as his entire basis for mocking the ad, and then obviously got emailed by a hundred thousand gamers saying "Dude, did you even play the game?"
I can't imagine anyone who actually played that bit of HL to forget the ninjas - it wasn't like they were easy to kill. Most people's first encounter with them was accompanied by the words "What the hell was that?!", usually quickly followed by some kind of death.
I also like the whole post-modern uber-cool irony employed about how dumb and shallow marketing people are to use sex to sell ads, and then to say something like "That's an extraordinarily ugly woman."
And the bonus of a "John Romero's hair is like a girl's hair!" joke. Maybe the brief for this piece was that his jokes had to be of the same vintage as the adverts.
Or, you know, you could buy a plastic bag or something. Then the other 99.9% of us that use laptops don't have to pay for your backwards idea of an acceptable environment for a laptop.
This is precisely the kind of insightful business acumen that I come to slashdot for.
Er...
Nah, they would have sold you the polarised resistors, along with some headlamp fluid they had going on special offer.
It was just a general point - wasn't having a go at you specifically or the scenario you describe :)
And to see if there are people in your office. At the crazy part of the dotcom boom, some VCs developed a habit of always visiting the offices of companies they were considering, just to make sure they actually had employees.
Of course, this resulted in some companies hiring people to sit at desks for the days the VCs visited.
What a great time that was.
I always think of it as removing a decision I have to make from the otherwise possibly very complicated business of moving a 1 ton block of metal around in a place where soft squishy people might be. Light is red - I stop. End of story.
I feel the same way about safety margins. Sadly, too many people seem to think that safety margin means, e.g. "Ooh, I can get there a bit quicker/be a bit closer to that car, and it's still safe."
The best environment I've ever worked in was an office that was an old country house, and most offices had 2 people in them. A few had 3 people. It's probably still the most productive environment.
However, one of the reasons was that there was a communal kitchen (well, when I say kitchen, it was a sink/drink making facilities at the end of the corridor), and people used to go there for tea/coffee breaks at 11am and 3pm. And when I say those times, I mean we would do it religiously. There was no official time or anything, it just seemed to be a subconscious consensus (it sometimes reminded me of synchronisation of menstruation via pheromones, but only superficially :-)).
The important thing was, those coffee breaks would often last 30-40 minutes. To a manager, that seems like an awful lot of wasted time - 15 coders standing around chatting for an hour a day. But the important point was that was where/how we socialised, and how a lot of problems were solved. It probably saved a lot of time, because you had 15 smart people standing around hearing (mostly) about what everyone was working on that day, and the problems that had come up. Everyone knew what was going on in all the other sections of the project they were working on, and how things were going.
Interestingly, when a kitchen was opened upstairs (we were on two floors) the staff then split into two kitchen groups. The managers were upstairs (along with some of the coders), and the downstairs guys often complained that they were out of the loop, and didn't get to hear about everything they should have. So it's a tricky balance, but like I say, I've never been so productive. Other aspects of the company were less than ideal, but the physical working environment was pretty good.
I still can't believe I only drank 2 cups of tea a day while working there...that can't be right.
I'd agree - I was around developing software at the time of OS/2 Warp, Win95 etc, and my general impression was that Windows 3.1x ownz0red the desktop. With OS/2, I always felt that IBM had to come up with a really good reason why you'd want to run it instead of Windows...and they never did (to be fair, I was running NT 3.1/3.5 around that time, so it was harder to convince me). It always seemed like a 'different' GUI rather than a better one. And the 'it runs all your Windows apps' adverts just made me think, "So does Windows...why do I want OS/2 again?"
And I'm a techie - if that was my opinion, it should be obvious why the general population went for whatever was the next version of Windows.
Bah. I much preferred Richard Hawkings' book on the subject, "A Brief History of God"
So if you don't have an ID card, you get tasered?
And all the ID card proponents keep saying how benign and helpful ID cards are.
"Where are your papers?!"
Johnny Christmas, do I have to explicitly tag every joke I make on slashdot?
Apparently so. I must be new here.
That's what MIME types are for. Duh.
So why not become a programmer? Apparently, you'd work less hours, have better conditions, a better defined job, and not get interrupted all the time.
After all, I'm sure programmers' jobs are easy. Just make the switch.
In the meantime, junior, pipe down and fix the mail server.
You must be new here.
You might want to refer to the post I replied to, in order to understand the point I was making.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up - I thought that NTFS supported symlinks for ages, too, but the article and comments seemed to suggest it was new, and I was only sure that I'd use hard-links before (I just download one of the hardlink command-line utilities/explorer context menus whenever I need to use links), so I assumed I was wrong about symlinks.
And yeah, shortcuts are quite sucky due to the .lnk thing.
I was using it from a Windows machine, but I was confused (and still am after your explanation), as to why aliases didn't work over SMB. You say it's 'obvious'. I thought an alias was a file system level object, from what I remembered when I read about them in 'Inside Macintosh'.
So, to me, it's irrelevant that Windows has never implemented a 'volume-ID to path resolution' system, as you're doing network sharing, so you already have a virtualisation layer present. If I use Windows to open a folder shared on a Mac via SMB, and that folder has an alias to another folder on the Mac, why doesn't that just appear as a standard folder via SMB? Isn't that the point of aliases? They 'just work', because they're low enough in the FS system to just work as files or folders? Obviously, if you want to, you can detect aliases (so, e.g. you don't back up the same folder twice in a backup program), but claiming it's the fault of the client machine or the network protocol seems a bit lame.
SMB supports files and folders, so aliases should 'just work', even over SMB. The fact that they don't seems to me to be the same failing as Vista is being berated for in this story.
No thanks. Big enter key please, with a backspace above that, like just about every other computer keyboard I've used in my life.
Actually :-) on XP (SP2, anyway), it seems to default to the 'Optimise for quick removal' policy for thumb drives/card readers, which basically means you can unplug the device without using the safe removal icon.
(Right click on drive, choose Properties, go to Hardware tab, click Properties, then go to 'Policies' tab to change this.)