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A High-School Hacker's Notebook 339

Posted by timothy from the if-mario-eats-a-helium-canister dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "Remember those high-school lunchtimes, back in the day, when you and your computer-nerd friends would hang out by the Krunch Korral, discussing that cool computer game that you were all going to write? And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."
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A High-School Hacker's Notebook More

A High-School Hacker's Notebook

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  • There have to be better ways to put those pages on the web than dozens of jpegs....

  • Mine was similiar (Score:4, Funny)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:03AM (#4053542) Journal
    Mine was similar, but it wasn't a game, it was a business that sold pet supplies online. A friend of mine (a great puppeteer) thought of a good sock mascot. Then, we were going to spend all our money on 1 huge superbowl commercial. We were going to make millions!!!!

    • Speaking of which has anybody seen the television commercial that apparently *bought* the sock puppet? Some sort of car insurance company or something. There's the pets.com puppet, back from the dead.
      • Perhaps it was Geiko? In a recent commercial, they also had the now-unemployed Taco Bell chiuahua auditioning to be the Geiko spokescreature. Naturally, the gecko got the job.

      • Re:Mine was similiar (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bokmann ( 323771 )
        It's a car insurance company called 'Geico'. they had a series of commercials with a large 'waiting room' of people as if they were trying out for a commercial spokesman competition. It was pretty funny.... if you looked through the crowd, they had ALL KINDS of sponsors from commercials past...

        Incedentally, GEICO is a large insurer around the washington, DC area... I'm not sure if they are across the U.S. GEICO stands for Government Enployees Insurance Company... but they have been a commercial company serving the general public for a long time (20+ years).
      • It's for Bar None (1-800-BARN-ONE, heh), a tote-the-note auto loan company. They say they've given the puppet a second chance, just like everyone "deserves a second chance on credit."
    • A mate and myself talked about writing a couple of really cool games (well, we thought they were cool at the time).

      One wouldn't have sold at all well outside Northern Ireland as nobody would understand the humour.

      The other was based on the actions of an estranged young man around the time(1989) by the name of Michael. I can't remember the details of the incident but he decided to take pot shots at people in his town then turned his rifle on himself. We were going to call it Michaels Shoot-out Challenge.

      Good job we didn't go through with it, we'd have been sued to b*ggery...
    • I've still got one of those puppets sitting on my desk.

  • I forgot (Score:4, Funny)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:05AM (#4053550) Journal
    I also has a dream in which I would get a degree in computer science and make money!!!

    I basically am about to get a degree in potato farming and the Irish Potato Famine just happened.

  • Even worse (Score:4, Funny)

    by papasui ( 567265 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:05AM (#4053552) Homepage
    I know a guy that spent all his time making instruction booklets for games that didn't exist. It started getting scarey when he did one with a multi-dick hermaphrodite named 'George' who worked in a cheese factory and your goal was to cultivate a new form of yeast infection from the bacteria used to grow cheese.

  • uh oh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by peatbakke ( 52079 ) <[gro.taep] [ta] [taep]> on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:06AM (#4053557) Homepage
    I've been out of high school for a long time and I still do that on my lunch breaks. And after work. On my coffee breaks. Before lectures. After lectures. While watching TV. Riding the bus. Walking down the street.

    But not in bed. The girlfriend put the kibosh on that one early on.
  • Called "Dodge the Slashdotting 2002", and base it on personal experience.

  • I cant see the notebook, but (Score:4, Funny)

    by PanBanger ( 465405 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:07AM (#4053561)
    if this was written in 1984 and the game consists of a big white circle being eaten by a big green circle, then I've been ripped off.

  • Hasent Changed.. much (Score:5, Funny)

    by Geldon ( 444090 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:11AM (#4053581)
    Im still in high school... and the only difference is that we sit around with our laptops and one person gets the 3D design, and another person does teh website, and another makes sure that we dont get sued for uninetntionally creating a game too similar to an existing one...

  • we did it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 )
    And I was the guy who wrote the music ... I still have the .mid files.

    Well, it was created in 'klik'n'create' which was some sort of scripting language game creation tool, but hey, it was a working side scroller! Not much real programming happenned.

    • Re:we did it (Score:4, Interesting)

      by brain159 ( 113897 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @09:19AM (#4053884) Journal
      klik'n'create (and its little brother klik'n'play) grew up to become The Games Factory (very similar to KnP). There's a new nifty-looking 3D one from the same people called Jamagic, which abandons KnP/TGFs "point and drool" pseudo-programming in favour of javascript [pseudo-programming]. Jamagic and TGF are available from clickteam.com [clickteam.com]
  • My delusions of designing video games started a bit earlier with my friends in like grade 5 or so. We'd draw out new levels for existing game franchises ie Mario, etc. We were going to try and make it and send it in to Nintendo and thought it would be magically good enough for our ideas to make it into a real game.

    Anyway I must still be delusional cause I'm starting my 4th year of formal game programming education this year, maybe I'll make a published game yet.

    At any rate this reminded me of just how long I've been trying this game making stuff, Yay ./!

    • heh, we had delusions allright... 3-5 DnD freaks, all had computers.

      It started even before highschool, like sometime in middle school.

      Problem is that 3 of the 5 knew basic and 1 of the 5 knew C (I was still learning). So the C guy made a couple dozen games (Starquest? Galaxyquest? it was certainly his best, and had 3-4 different versions, including a 3d prototype during out Junior year).

      These days I'm spending time compiling a huge classic ff-based world and refining the idea of using Java reflection & some of my own code validation schemes to have a programmer's RPG. I.E. your sword is a Java class that must follow certain pre & post condition & statistical rules or it's either rejected or breaks.
    • this was me .. i'd be all about making new puzzles and trees and things fFor "Below the Root". cool ol' C=64 game :)

  • Deader than . . . dead (Score:3, Informative)

    by GlassUser ( 190787 ) <slashdot AT glassuser DOT net> on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:13AM (#4053589) Homepage Journal
    It's gone. Too many jpegs? No mirror, no google cache, no nada. Just gone.

  • Not mine... (Score:4, Funny)

    by magicsquid ( 85985 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:13AM (#4053591) Homepage
    And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."

    Hmmm... that doesn't look like my handwriting.

  • We didn't have time to make games (Score:5, Funny)

    by yeoua ( 86835 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:16AM (#4053604)
    We were too busy fending off those big goons who tried to take our lunch money.
    • Well, if it makes you feel any better, garote is a friend of mine (I contributed to those notebook pages on other subjects, and holy crap if I ever thought as many folks as read /. would ever be looking at them!) and we had to endure quite a bit torment and harassment by the goons.


      A decade later, we're now all quite successful and happy in our lives. In contrast, while home visiting the 'rents a few years ago, I caught a story on the local news about one of the worst bullies we had to deal with. He got his kicks throwing fist-sized rocks at us in high school. He has just been convicted of attacking a randomly chosen homeless man with a bat, just for fun. They said they were postponing his sentencing hearing pending tests to see if he had brain damage. Nothing any of us couldn't have told everybody years before. . .its' just sad somebody had to really get hurt before anything was done.

      • I had a health teacher in junior high that I, along with every other guy in the room, just knew was a sexual predator. Not violently so, but it was pretty obvious the guy was sleeping with a student or 2. This is junior high, mind you, so these girls were(thinking..) 12-14 years of age or so.

        So one day I'm watching the news, and I see this guy has been arrested for statchatory(sp?) rape. I move to the phone so fast I created a paradox in my living room. All of my friends lines are busy, for at least 20 minutes, maybe 10-15 people. Finally I get through to one. "Oh SHIT! Did you hear about Mr. C'Debaca? Bastard is in jail, yo!" "Hell yeah I heard, my phone hasn't stopped ringing in 20 minutes!"

        From that point on, if I suspected that of any other teachers(cough, Mr. Eberhardt, cough), I mor or less assumed it to be true.

  • Remember when? High school? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dmorin ( 25609 ) <dmorin@gmail . c om> on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:16AM (#4053606) Homepage Journal
    The concept still exists. It's called Sourceforge.

    "Hey, I have an idea, but I have no skills, so I'm looking for people to do all the work and I just want all the credit! What, no takers? Open source sucks!"

  • I wrote 20% of heaps of games. An early one was a text-mode based game on the Atari 800 with remapped character graphics, collision detection, etc... then I started playing a great new ground-breaking game and forgot all about it...

    Rinse, lather, repeat for my entire life...

  • Jeez (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigJimSlade ( 139096 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:23AM (#4053633) Homepage
    People, the Slashdot effect is getting out of hand. We've now slashdotted a spiral-bound notebook? Someone must put an end to this madness!

    • It's not funny. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I am getting really sick of Slashdot wrecklessly posting links to webservers that they KNOW cannot withstand more than 5 minutes of slashdotters. These people have to pay for bandwidth most of the time, and one linking can cost the web sites several hundred dollars.

      Posting a link on slashdot is very much like a DOS attack. Slashdot knows how many users visit its site, and knows that most of the sites that they link to cannot handle the load. This is wreckless and negligent, and one day Slashdot is going to get into trouble over it.
  • Hosted by The Braindead Monkeys

    I got this and none of the seemingly endless number of JPGs that made up the rest of the page. I'd say this much is apparent from the page design and willingness to submit to the Slashdot Effect.

    -N

  • Teenagers, practising their skills, consider their 'work' worthy of historical note. Arrogance? Youth? Ites says: easy to make drawings in the sand. Ideas are cheap. Finish the job and you will deserve to be remembered.
    • it is not the work or the content of the notebook that is noteworthy here. it is the whole concept of what they are doing. It's something all of us have done in the past. also notice the topic it is under? it's not under the "take this seriously or die" topic, now is it?

  • Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by glh ( 14273 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:25AM (#4053645) Homepage Journal
    I think slashdot could help everyone out by doing the following.

    1. Any time an article is submitted that refers to a non-news site (such as the one in this story), slashdot should automatically pull a copy of the page/story and put it somewhere in a temporary cache. The story would automatically generate the "slashdot cache" link and content when the article is posted.

    2. The temporary cache that these web pages are pulled into only exist for the stories that are on the front page (or perhaps a day). After that specified time, the cache is flushed.

    This code would be VERY simple to write. All it is is a simple screen scrape! A list of sites to not cache (such as yahoo news, cnn, etc.) could be kept in a simple text file.

    Despite copyright laws, I think people that have sites that can't handle a slashdot load would prefer a copy of their content on slashdot as opposed to an effective DDOS. Both readers and site owners would be MUCH HAPPIER.

    Just my 2c. PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! IT IS VERY ANNOYING, ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS WHEN SOMEONE TYPES IN ALL CAPS.
    • You could even call it something cool, like "slash cache"..
    • And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue (ok, I'm showing my age there - do you kiddies remember when banner ads were going to make money?) or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?

      I still get a pang of regret every time I see a hit in my Apache logs for somebody looking for that picture of a computer case made out of a beer box that I posted to Slashdot about 3 years ago. Why did I remove that picture?

    • See, the weird thing here is that the text referring to the person who submitted this article ('anonymous reader') hass a link to the server that this notebook sits on - could it be that in self-promotion, they killed their own machine?

      As a sysadmin, is there any information anywhere on what sort of machine/connection can handle a slashdot load? I've seen hitcounters of slashdotted sites, and the hits weren't as bad as I was expecting, is it really just that slashdotted servers are 486s in someone's shed?
      • As a sysadmin, is there any information anywhere on what sort of machine/connection can handle a slashdot load? I've seen hitcounters of slashdotted sites, and the hits weren't as bad as I was expecting, is it really just that slashdotted servers are 486s in someone's shed?

        My goal is to get my server slashdotted so I can monitor and tweak it over the time period to see how it handles the load. Lucky sods...
      • I run a small home server over ADSL, but I also get 20mb of web space at my ISP that can handle the bandwidth.
        A sensible self promothing poster would move there content to a high bandwidth site before posting.

      • As a sysadmin, is there any information anywhere on what sort of machine/connection can handle a slashdot load?


        Well, I had the Slashdot Effect hit me. My problem was not machine speed (well, yeah, it was), but more the bandwidth. I had a 4 meg GIF file on a webserver over a T-1 connection to AT&T. This file sat on a Pentium II with 96 MB RAM. This machine also runs many other functions, including Spam Assassin and mail for about 2,000 users. Also, my main website runs Post Nuke [postnuke.com] and so I got bandwidth Slashdotted because I had 30,000 requests for a 4 MB file by noon of day one. That is over 100 gigabytes to transfer, and a single T-1 can only handle 17 gigabytes per day! I replaced the image with a smaller images (5K), but the number of requests made the webserver go haywire. Before it ran a load average of maybe 0.70 fulfilling all its requests, but when I cut to the smaller size GIF and more requests came in, the load average went to more than 100.00!


        The end result was three days of monitoring, firewalling, changing GIFs, etc. My main website (running Post Nuke) got more traffic that day than any other in its history. More than 3,000 requests came day one just from the link with my name. I feel that it is still majorly responsible for the traffic I get, and I still get many links to the 4 MB GIF file.


        On another note, I had submitted a story once before that did not point to me, but the link from my name generated more than 10,000 hits in that month.


        Could my webserver stand up to Slashdot? If I had more memory -- yes! However, the bandwidth was the problem. It is a marriage of the two bottlenecks that allows systems to beat the effect. If I had my site distributed across several Internet connections and many different, powerful systems it would have been no problem -- just a heavy day.

      • Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT (Score:5, Interesting)

        by adadun ( 267785 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @11:27AM (#4054686) Homepage
        The reason why sites are brought down because of the slashdot effect is probably a combination of two things: (1) large pictures on the web page (like in this case) and (2) lots of server side scripting. In the former case the server bandwidth is the bottleneck, whereas in the latter case the server runs out of CPU cycles and RAM.

        I have been slashdotted twice myself (Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64 [slashdot.org] and VNC Server for Toasters and Light-Switches [slashdot.org]). In both cases the web server running on the Commodore 64 was really slow because of the load, whereas the "regular" web server hosting the description pages behaved differently in the two cases. The first time there were a number of pictures on the linked page, and the web server was sluggish because of the load. The other time the web page only consisted of a single HTML text page with a single picture and the load on the web server was hardly noticeable.

        The web server on the first occation was a dual CPU PC with 2 GB RAM and for the second occation the server was a single CPU PC with 256 MB RAM. The first web server also hosts some hundred domains, whereas the second only hosts one. The Commodore 64 has 64kB RAM and runs at 1 MHz, but only hosted one domain.

        To sum up: a web server running on a Commodore 64 is a little too slow to be able to deliver pages in full speed during a slashdotting, whereas a PC can handle it, given that the web page consists mostly of text and doesn't have too many heavy scripts.
      • I've seen two Slashdottings locally - one was to a mirror of some KDE screenshots (which is kinda funny, since I'm a GNOME user :)), and the other was the Linux Powered Christmas Tree [slashdot.org].

        Both were very small pages with relatively small downloads, and both survived the Slashdot effect relatively well. However, this is probably because both were behind an OC-48 connection to the Internet...

        I don't know about the Christmas tree's load, but it was a P100 with 64MB RAM, and it surivived the load fairly well. (I think - it appears that everybody was able to access the tree and view it and several people were able to bitch about it "not really being a Linux powered Christmas tree" by either contesting it being a Christmas tree or by contesting it being "Linux powered" - but now is not the time or place to argue that. However, if posters could come to conclusions about that, then they probably could view the site.)

        The bottom line is that most servers, assuming they aren't doing some serious server side scripting, can safely handle the Slashdot effect without melting down. The Slashdot Effect is almost always a bandwidth issue and can easily be compared with a DDOS attack - massive incoming requests and outgoing answers filling the available bandwidth. Except that in the case of a Slashdotting, the requests are all valid and are attempting to access the resource, and not just run it off the net.

        And while the caching suggestion to help the Slashdot Effect has been given many, many times - enough to appear in the FAQ - the reality is that the editors should actually consider implementing it instead of just dismissing it. I still believe that the right thing to do is to contact the site authors and determine whether or not the site can handle the load. The stories are staggered anyway; seriously, this story could have safely waited a month or longer to come to a mutual agreement with the site operator about how to handle the load.

        Six hours is nothing if it means the site won't get taken off the net due to excessive bandwidth usage.

        In relation to the KDE links, I still have my server logs of the connections and would at some point like to try and give a better view of the Slashdot effect from the side of a server. For simple text articles, it's not that bad. For movies and large images, on the other hand, I'd imagine it could be a lot harsher. If anyone's interested, I could release the logs minus the IP information. Due to the state of flux my e-mail is currently in, either reply via Slashdot or simply send via Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] - I'll find it :)

    • Hey, Thats a good idea. Why dont you submit it as a Features Request [sourceforge.net] for slash code?

    • Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT (Score:4, Insightful)

      by redink1 ( 519766 ) <redink1@ h o t m a il.com> on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:56AM (#4053796) Homepage Journal
      A couple of other things that should be done in addition to your ideas. 1) Only link to the 'Slash Cache' if the site is down. Check every 10 minutes to see if the site is down, and if it is display the handly Slash Cache link. If the site is reachable again, then remove the link. This solves the problem of lost banner revenue, as the site can't get banner revenue if it is dead. 2) I believe there is something in the robots.txt file (or some other config file) that Google searches for that will tell it not to cache pages. Slashdot could look for the same thing, and see if caching is allowed. This should bypass any copyright problems.

    • Re:Suggestion to help SLASHDOT EFFECT (Score:4, Funny)

      by The Dev ( 19322 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @09:00AM (#4053814)
      Of course they could just host the images on
      Geekshelf [geekshelf.com] and not worry about it :)

    • Re:Slash Cache? too costly... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by djtack ( 545324 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @09:10AM (#4053859)
      This code would be VERY simple to write.

      It sounds like you're assuming the problem is technical. I think it is not. Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over. (Rob says very few people read comments. So instead of loading one front page, the readers now load one front page plus four cached articles. Bandwidth consumption has just pentupled!)

      The other issue here, obviously, is copyright infringement. Sure, you and I know that it's benign, even helpful to the site creator, but not everyone is going to see it that way. I can't imagine the slashdot editors want to deal with the legal headaches that could arise here.

      I have an idea, though... maybe Google would be willing to set up a "streamlined" URL submission page for "trusted" submitters - I bet quite a few Google employees read slashdot. It would allow the trusted users to submit URL's that would be immediately cached and indexed, instead of the usual several week lag time. Google can afford the bandwidth, and their cache is already a generally accepted part of the net landscape. Of course, this doesn't help with image-intensive pages, but those stories are usually lame anyway (woahhhh, dude, check out that case mod! it's got a big hole chopped in the side and it's filled with strawberry Jell-O.)
      • Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over.

        Judging from all the editors' comments that "people don't come here to read the comments", by process of elimination they come here to read the front page and visit neat links. And if they want to keep shoving ads down our throat and bitching about [donations|subscriptions|/. pity parties], they'd better deliver the fucking content. And if the content is on a DSL line with a P2 as a webserver, it's their responsibility to ensure that i'm getting some value in exchange for that annoying banner ad at top.

        Just like the elitist fucks that review 7 inch singles that nobody can find in indie magazines and then bitch about why nobody cares about their reviews.
    • ... for all the messy copyright issues it raises. Asking a site that's about to be slashdotted if it wants to be cached would be a bit of a pain, and might delay reporting the story if no response was forthcomming. I think the Slashdot FAQ answers these and other related questions.

      That said, it would be very nice if there was some standard machine readable mechanism to indicate, "yes, you may cache this to avoid slashdotting this site" that the site could serve. Of course, then it gets complex: the caching parameters have to be specified, you ight want allow/deny lists for cachers, etc. Finally, if someone does cache such a site, they'd want to have legal proof that permission was granted, and that brings us to the use of PKI and certified digital signatures.

      Great idea, but the overhead of a practical implementation with legal safeguards is probably too high. Hmm, perhaps such caching could be construed as a "fair use" of copyright material?

      • It would be very nice if there was some standard machine readable mechanism to indicate, "yes, you may cache this to avoid slashdotting this site" that the site could serve

        It's called robots.txt [robotstxt.org] and that's what Google and archive.org use.
        • Yes, of course, but I don't know if "his robots.txt configuration let me scrape his site" would hold up in court -- it is a question of the law being behind the technology here.

          Furthermore, how do you defend against people changing their robots.txt configurations after the fact that their site has been scraped and claiming that scraping was not permitted in the first place?

  • Remember when... (Score:5, Funny)

    by artemis67 ( 93453 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:29AM (#4053670)
    Remember when you were a kid and you had this cool idea for a video game, so you put it up on a website, but some big bully of a site came along, pushed you down in the mud, slashdotted your site and stole your lunch money?

  • memories (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bjtuna ( 70129 ) <brian&intercarve,net> on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:36AM (#4053700) Homepage
    Remember those high-school lunchtimes, back in the day, when you and your computer-nerd friends would hang out by the Krunch Korral


    My high school lunchtimes were either spent eating lunch, joking around with friends, doing homework or going off-campus to smoke pot with friends. Incidentally, none of my friends were computer nerds; I was pretty much the only computer nerd in my class (it was a small school, about 100 people per class). I never let computers define me... it was a hobby. Had I let my life revolve around computer (games|systems|hacking|programming), I probably would have found I had nothing in common with anyone at my school.


    On the other hand, I think it would have been cool to have a couple geek friends in high school.


    This was obviously a little off-topic, but I have tons of karma and that quip from the story topic made me think about it.

  • Errr no... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:43AM (#4053737) Homepage
    Am I the only one here who wondered more about what party to go to at the weekend and chatting up the girls ? And going to practice explicitly because it seemed to make you more attractive to women. Was I strange that as a 14 year old I was obsessed by breasts ?

    Damn didn't realise I should have been worrying about other things :-)
  • Only we were going to make one of those uber special graphics demos that ran in 386 Protected Mode! oooooh, aaaah!

    My friend who did the music was the only one with talent, so he eventually realized the rest of us weren't going to be mastering vector based 3D graphics engines in the middle of grade 11. However, I did end up learning how to write an assembly library and link it into a QuickBASIC program... that's something!
    • Mastering 3d vector based engines isn't the problem. Making them run fast enough on a 386..ahh..that was difficult.

      Oddly enough, I didn't make the connection between linear algebra and 3d graphics until I had a spaceflight dynamics course in college...then it hit me...this satellite equation stuff is exactly what I could use to do 3d graphics on the pc...Cool! :)

  • Nintendo Power sponsored a create-a-game... (Score:3, Informative)

    by NixterAg ( 198468 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:48AM (#4053762)
    Nintendo Power sponsored a contest around 12 or so years ago challenging its readers to come up with spiffy game concepts and submit them. They got some pretty incredible submissions that were incredibly detailed and highly original. The winner was a neat design by budding 14 year old artist Jeffrey Scott Campbell, who I believe went on to a career as a comic book artist. Some dedicated Nintendo junkie out there might still have the issue in question to verify.

  • The great game notebook... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ivrcti ( 535150 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:53AM (#4053781)
    Now my 14 year old son has one. Hell, he may end up like me. Jeez.. I better talk to that kid!

  • Here's a kid that followed through (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gregor-e ( 136142 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @08:54AM (#4053785) Homepage
    My buddy's kid is still in High School. He not only had these same dreams - he actually sat down with his buddy and hacked out about 50K lines of C++ to produce a playable 3D shooter [cjb.net]. From scratch, no less. (Krikes - and I thought the 1000 line poker game I wrote in High School was somethin...)
    • What kind of person are you, anyway? ;)
      Submitting a link to a kid's site on /. ! That's sort of like sending out a hit squad.. his poor 100Mhz server feels the pain...

      Here's from his site: "Thank god for my slow upload speed, or my poor little 100mhz linux server would be getting owned. I guess our site got posted in a slashdot comment, and now im getting quite a few hits (alot more then my 256k upload can handle). So, i guess if you are reading this, you are lucky to get through :D"

  • I keep a notebook with all the cool toys I'm going to get when I graduate from the university. I made my perfect pc, my ultimate car stereo, and pimp home theater. Problem is, since I'm graduating in Computer Science, they'll be on paper for a while.
  • 27 years, and I've certainly not grown out of filling notebooks (or harddrives) with ideas I hope to have time to implement someday... Or, alternatively, get rich enough to hire someone else to implement :-)
  • Maybe I'm too old, but not many of the games I played had music (or maybe it was so bad that I'm blocking it out), and the one I was writing in Pascal back at ol' St. Ignatius College Prep sure didn't have any music!
  • In high school, I had one of those TI graphing calculators. You could write programs on it, although they were fairly limited (the whole thing only had 32K memory!) and you had access to a total of 26 variables and six lists. Still, I wrote two games for it - a side-scroller spaceship-shooting-aliens game (complete with upgradeable guns when you shot x enemies down) and a vertical scrolling pole-position game. Everybody in my school with a TI-82 had a copy of those games. Sadly, though, I lost them on the day of the AP exam, and the backup I made turned out to be corrupted.
  • I didn't plan for many games in high school... I mostly played them. Ok I did try to make some simple basketball game I believe... and I made a few games on my calculator. But I do have some notes left where I was trying to make plans for a self learning AI(!) Ofcourse nothing came out of that... Oh yeah in high school I also started this bold project of making an Othello ("Reversi" for some of you) game with an AI. I still have the code, and the most you can do is to move a cursor around and place those discs on the board. However just recently I've been planning and making notes for a Civilization like game. Ofcourse, I haven't done anything more than that.

  • Mirror (Score:2, Informative)

    by Kjellander ( 163404 )

    I'm trying to mirror the site but it's going slow. Only 2 of the images so far.

    http://razor.hemmet.chalmers.se/garote.bdmonkeys.n et/notebook/ [chalmers.se]

  • Well, I never kept a notebook. That's just more evidence they can use against you at the trial.

  • Alright... this makes me an old fogey... but there were no computers available when I was in high school. The only computer I had even SEEN in person was MANIAC, because it lived across the street from me (at UNM) when I was in Junior High School.

    So us high school nerds played chess instead.

    My first year out of high school (1965), OTOH, got me hooked on computers - Fortran programming on a 7094 at the University.... and life has been nerd-dom ever since!

    Me thinks the slashdot folks are a bit, shall we say, less experienced (all right... younger :-) in life.
  • Hey, everyone. This is the guy that runs bdmonkeys.net.

    You might be entertained to know that Slashdot managed to completely annihilate my firewall in just about 2 1/2 hours!

    The firewall box was a little 486-66 with 24 megs running Linux out of a RAMdisk.

    The data on the hard drive (The boot media) has somehow been corrupted. I can mount it on another machine, but I can't boot from it at all. Interesting, considering that the drive wasn't even mounted at the time it died...
    Also, the machine is totally flaky now. Memory errors out the wazoo. I can boot from a floppy, but it'll only stay up 5--30 minutes. I think you guys actually managed to completely trash this machine! :-)

    When I first found it, it was just spewing a bunch of hex numbers to the screen. Probably BIOS error codes or something, I don't know.
    No big deal. It completely cracked me up yesterday when I saw that my machine was actually *physically damaged* by the Slashdot Effect. :-)

    So, I picked up a P-150 with 64 MB today for $20. I finally got it configured about 20 minutes ago.

    The instant I brought it up, the "ACTIVITY" light went solid.

    Anyone wanna make any guesses how long this one will last?

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