I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.

I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).

The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.

There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.

A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.

Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.

The text has been online at faifzilla, that's how I read it. And printed out the whole thing. Going to pick up a 2.0 copy for real this time, though.

Human-derived Organic Mental Cores may be suitable.

Heh, is this is alternate form of "That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me"?

Direct stimulation (by the pressure you're putting on the retina) of the various edge and pattern detection nets that connect the photoreceptors to the optic nerve. At least that's been my interpretation.

I see your argument, but... the "goes around" phenomenon is the Earth-Sun system's effect on the Earth, not its effect on the Sun. Its effect on the Sun is "wobbles imperceptibly".
Though I'm sure that's unconvincing if you're seriously arguing :)

Put the shared metadata in the metadata stream?

Rootkit? They already own the OS more fundamentally than you do.

The SimLife manual was my introduction to evolution. Appropriate for a simulation, it included a lab book with suggested experiments to run and space to record and analyze the results. The main manual was over 200 pages and went into significant detail not just about the game (which was ridiculously complex) but about genetics in general, and also included a bizarre series of cartoons wherein a family gradually mutates themselves. SimEarth was similar with its coverage of Gaia theory, though I never really could get into that game. Relatedly, I've spent more time reading AD&D manuals than playing.

But I'm the kind of person who enjoys reading manuals anyway. Netscape's heartwarming introduction was delightfully cheesy.

I know I'm quite late, but I've always seen 0 at 0 on AIX. A quick test with

printf("%p\n",*(void**)0);

gives 0. This is 6.1.3, though, it may have been the way you say on some older release.

From the article:

It sounds like "know the rules and how they are broken" was in fact the essence of this approach.

type * > bigfile

Is this binary safe? Windows stdout defaults to text mode, I assume type works that way too. On Windows I've always used copy /b file1 + file2 bigfile

At that point isn't the company the whole society, especially considering workers as a resource? It sounds like talking about thermodynamics, and saying "but there is no true closed system, with the exception of the entire universe."

And here I was just thinking of The Colour Out of Space...

Sure, and a protection racket could do a much better job keeping things safe by performing regular inspections, replacing smoke detector batteries, etc.