Agreed. The assertion is totally ridiculous. Smells like slashdot is getting played by someone who wants to convince the world to buy underpowered GPUs.

That's why you want to save meals and sex for when you've been good.

It'll seem a little counter-intuitive, but I strongly recommend JavaScript in the Unity game engine for a lotta reasons.

The problem with most visual programming languages is that they don't transition well to written languages, which you start to pine for after getting sick of dragging the output of one module to the input of another for the 300th time. You want this just for laziness/productivity reasons, and it also happens to be a good way to get her motivated to learn English faster.

So here's my thinking: JavaScript and Unity are clearly going to stick around a while, so it's a skill that serve her a long time. Kids love playing games and just about all want to make games. It's a great way to motivate them to learn anything.

You can start with pre-made game templates (tons of stuff out there as well as cheap games w/ source on the asset store, and it's easy to make your own mini-games), and just let her futz around inside the scene editor, changing the numbers for the weapons, health, colours of things, etc. No programming required here. This is all done through easy-to-play-with inspectors which hide the ugly truth that you're changing the initialization numbers of the public members of classes in JavaScript.

This is going to feel fun for a while and is an easy way to start, because it's partly like cheating, and when you push numbers to ridiculous extents, it can even really change the nature of gameplay sometimes.

But there's going to come a point where she's sick of being limited to changing surface stuff, and she's going to want to change behaviours, so she's gonna need to look inside of that Badguy.js file attached to the bad guy that she put the pink hat on for "public float healthPoints;" to see what happens to the "Health Points" mentioned in the inspector for the bad guy class so she can come up with a special weapon that cuts the hit points in half, or that heals the baddie up slowly, or that makes the baddie pinker, or whatever she wants to do.

Lo and behold. She's coding.

Unity is made in Copenhagen, so I'm sure Danish docs are possible, but I don't know much about where they'd be. I think if you want to code, tho, you'd better get used to English. English won that war.

The one. The only. The original monitor:

] CALL -151

The problem with progress bars is that computer science hasn't stressed measuring the time and resource cost of different kinds of computation. We talk about the Big-O notation and discuss profiling as if it were a curiosity. This is contributing to making operating systems sloppy about what kind of resources they'll allocate to a given process to the point where the idea of a "real-time" operating system is considered novel and different instead of the norm.

If we learned a holistic time and resource cost to our code and built in self-profiling in from the start, we could have extremely accurate progress bars, assuming they reflected a deterministic process, which the vast majority are.

Suicidal tendencies might explain some of the big risks he took.

Fire him. He'll start telling all his other job prospects how stupid your code was, and then he'll magically discover that he either doesn't get hired because he's a whiny bitch or that only other assholes will hire him, and then poverty, misery, or both will mop up the rest of his attitude by serving as a gentle nudge to stfu and code.

I know this will sound odd coming from the guy who helped popularize games on Linux w/ the Doom & Quake ports, but I actually want more text-based games like nethack.

I've been playing nethack constantly for about 20 years now, and I've only won a few dozen times. I just won again as a monk last night, and it was still concentrated awesome. I think a big part of its excellence is that it doesn't have pretty graphics to lean on, so it was forced to be seriously fucking fun and different every time. You just don't find games with that amount of procedurally generated, radically different gameplay every time you play them anymore. I also love that it's turn based because it actually lets me play the game faster the better I get at it, and I type 100wpm, which means I get a shit-ton more enjoyment out of it than I can out of most graphically-intensive real-time games. I also love that I can play it entirely with the keyboard without ever having to slow myself down with a mouse. I also love that I can read the source code, scour the nethack wiki, and still be challenged every time I play it. Plus, every time someone catches me playing it, they think I'm hard at work on something technical. :)

Nethack is really a masterwork of game design, and I'd love to play more masterwork text-based RPG's as well as other genres like strategy.

I think like most people, I use Linux only on servers and over ssh, so it's really the format I want the game in. The fancy graphics I want are coloured, extended-ASCII graphics. That's plenty, thanks!

Hostess has been a major arms dealer in the war against diabetes in the US. It's great to see them finally fail.

Next up: McDonalds? Dare we dream?

The US gov't should be heavily taxing food this unhealthy or subsidizing food that is healthy. Neither of these is happening, and it's fucking ridiculous.

Mitt's a devout Mormon. When they say they're gonna pray for someone, they mean it, and it's not a "fuck you". Prayer is basically self-programming. It means the supplicant is probably going to do things consciously or unconsciously to help out with whatever he's praying for.

I'm not religious, but the bitterness on here is really disheartening. It was an ugly process, but I think we came out the other side of these elections a lot better off on several fronts, and I'm a little more hopeful for the future.

Please switch! Closed source / binary ABI focused ecosystems do so well when you switch processors!

Between this brilliant idea and the Win 8 faceplant, I've never seen a stronger opportunity for Linux (or Android) to have another credible shot at the desktop. Linux can switch to ARM easily. OSX and Windows can't.

This is incredible! It's just like a terminal window, but SLOWER! Want!

Arrogant nerds won't listen to you unless you're either on par or further up the nerd hierarchy than they are. You've got to demonstrate your powerful nerd skills to do this. One opportunity to prove your nerd credentials is to do something the arrogant nerd states emphatically can't be done, and then you do it, but just throwing down with the right nerd track record can sometimes work, too.

After you've demonstrated your nerd qualifications, then you need to deliver a *withering* attack and follow up with a play-by-play of their arrogance at the start of the argument, because if you don't, by then, they will have forgotten their crime, as they're generally only dimly aware of the arrogant affectations of their delivery.

But it's a long shot even if you pull this off. For a lot of them, it's just too late. They didn't get the right parenting to temper their arrogance, and without great parenting, you generally don't get great kids.

This is obviously hampered by the fact that good engineers are exceedingly rare, and all kinds of bad behaviours are tolerated in order to secure their continued employment.

Works for me fine on Mac OS (10.7.5) Firefox (16.0.1).

Part 2 is even more awesomer than Part 1.

Thanks so much, Eben, for your time, service, and wisdom!