While what people are saying here is likely valid (game development is not "fun and games", etc etc), I'd like to suggest an alternative to lying to them or pawning them off to a school that will only postpone their decision-making process wrt game development: suggest that they work on an open source game. Working with an open source game is

- a tremendous learning experience
- a resume booster
- free
- easily accessible

Personal example: I never wanted to be a game developer, but I was interested in how games work and how to make them better feature-wise. After looking around I found the Xonotic project, for which I now provide feedback and test for. It's a win/win for me and the project team; I've learned a lot in the process and the project team gets free map reviews and gameplay videos.

Background reading: one of the Drizzle guys who is moving over to Rackspace has a pretty good blog post on the move.

Although Drizzle is a really stripped down version of MySQL at the moment, it seems like the developers are trying to make it into what they thought MySQL should have been in the first place: a simple, modular database for web applications. From their FAQ:

Rackspace sounds like a perfect environment for them to fine tune their project under real world loads. Good on 'em.

Before you hand wave e-mail address validation off as a simple regular expression, you may want to take a look at the code behind an actual RFC-compliant validator. Hardly just a regular expression.

Agreed. s/money maker/inimitable resource/.

Could someone please explain the advantage of a dedicated e-book reader? I don't understand why I would buy either when I can get a netbook for $50 more (at worst) that can read both PDFs and Amazon e-books. Is it the battery life of these things, or is the hardware form factor really nice? I don't know.

Clerk: Danger Powers personal effects [shows box of off-site tapes and such]
MS: Actually my name is Microsoft Powers...
Clerk: It says here - name: Danger Powers
MS: No no no no no... Danger is my middle name
Clerk: Okay, Microsoft Danger Powers...

Garth Algar: Uhm, Wayne? What do you do if every time you see this one incredible project administrator, you think you're gonna hurl?
Wayne Campbell: I say hurl. If you blow chunks and he comes back, he's yours. But if you spew and she bolts, then it was never meant to be.

I would guess that they would want to put a new web GUI around their repositories, with metadata and shiny pictures to guide the user towards applications they might want. It is a new concept on what we've had for years now, only with a less-clunky interface (no offense to ATrpms and friends - they do a great job!).

That's exactly what I did for the MythTV system down in my basement. It is working quite fine, thank you very much.

Long time distance runner here. While running barefoot converts more of your energy into forward motion, shoes can protect us against those oh-so-prevalent sharp things on the ground. Granted if you run barefoot enough you will develop thicker skin, but (speaking from experience) I would still check the ground first before I ran barefoot on it. The last thing I need is to step on tiny shards of glass when training for a marathon. Ouch.

The article also spends little time discussing one big factor in the increase of running injuries: the surface on which most people run these days. Soft earth is infinitely more forgiving than asphalt, but due to its convenience asphalt/pavement is probably used the most. This leads to more running injuries as more and more runners are literally out in the streets, pounding their poor feet on a surface that doesn't give.

We've read about this particular data center before, though we didn't have this video. The first link in TFA has layouts and other pictures. Very cool.

Perl hint: s/([a-fA-F0-9]{2})/chr(hex $1)/eg;

My kingdom for mod points! You are spot on. Mod up people!

I was forced to learn it for the job (Quest Foglight uses Groovy for its internal ruleset), but I ended up liking it for its:

• Interactive console
• Perl-like regular expression support
• Optional typing
• Support for "for i in $array" syntax

Or, are you suggesting that everyone write their web apps in C?

YES. And you'll like it too, dammit!