The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Rick Owens:

Re: backups/tests/having a plan B/other IT insurance methods and those who scoff at them...

Whenever one of our users gripes about such "wasted" efforts, I usually respond with my take on the Murphy/Finagle laws.

Long version: You're insufficiently paranoid; the universe will mess up your plans unless you do something about it, and that mess will probably be very painful to clean up. {Can be expanded as needed into an hour long lecture about Murphy, Finagle, statistics, failing gracefully v. failing spectacularly, learn from my mistakes, etc., etc. Sometimes the mere threat of such a lecture is sufficient to make folks behave.}

Short version: Which way do you want to be wrong (about your expectations)? {Because sooner or later you will be!}

Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet: NoScript is another piece of armor for your browser (if you're using Firefox, that is), which blocks javascript and plugins on untrusted web sites. Recommended.

Cat Meadors @78:

Re. loss of resources from the 80's to now: I think that's largely because computers have gone mainstream. Early home computers came out of a culture that valued tinkering and hobby work; getting into the guts of the machine was part of the draw. Now, PCs are more of a commodity, and many folks don't want to know about the internals.

Purely guessing on my part, but I suspect that kids who want to learn about computers today have to find adults who are willing to help them along. Languages like Logo and Scratch are good places to start; giving a kid an OLPC computer is another option.

Kevin Reid @71:

Re. Spoilers found while reading code - yes, exactly. In most cases the spoilers from reading strings didn't matter because the random number generator controlled (at least partially) which code branches ran during a given game. Massive surprises were impossible, but minor ones were part and parcel of game play.

One's fluency in the language also made a difference - if you couldn't follow the logic, you couldn't see how pieces would be put together later on. In some cases you couldn't even see the logic at all - anyone else remember games from Compute! and other magazines, where you had to type in pages of hex codes? At that point I had the tools to look at the assembly language after keying it all in, but not the knowledge. Later on I played with 6502 ASM, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten it. Maybe someday I'll revisit it... eh, probably not, higher level languages are more fun. :)

j h woodyatt @ 32:

I remember the book you linked to, because I checked it out of our school library quite a few times. Does http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/ help any?

Abi @ 140
Yes... in this case, it's a syntax.

More economics in SF: George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral series. Smith has his characters develop a matter duplicator, which breaks the economy and alters the culture. Later on they come up with a material which can't be duplicated (because it will blow up if you try!) to use as currency. The resulting economy is straightforward enough, but very different from what came before. FWIW, the stories were written from 1942 to 1947, with an additional story written in 1973.

A fix for bandwidth limits: visit a wayback version of the test.

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