Comment Best bang for the buck (Score 1) 188
A deck of cards, only $2 or $3 to buy, offers hundreds of hours of play. Plus, if you win at Poker it's an income source!
How Do You Measure a Game's Worth? 188
RamblingJosh writes "Video games can be very expensive these days, especially with so many great games on the horizon. So I wonder: how exactly do you get the most gaming entertainment for your dollar? '... the first thing I personally thought about when approaching this was money spent versus time played. Using Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions as an example: I bought the game for about $30 Canadian, and played it for roughly 85 hours. That comes out to 2.83 hours per dollar spent, a pretty good number. In this case, the game was a lot of fun and it was cheap, and so the system works fairly well. There are so many other things to think about, though. What if the game wasn't so good? What about the fact that it's portable? ... What about the new content? Multiplayer?'"
Comment Be able to learn (Score 1) 569
Don't get overly invested in just one or two languages. You don't want to just be "another journeyman C++ programmer" in 5 years but you want to be someone who can solve problems and get results with a computer in any language.
In other words need to know the basic concepts of scripting, procedural programming, object oriented programming and functional programming and be able to learn the new models for the 21st century. You need to know about data structures, interface design, etc. But the tools you use can, and should, change over time.
When I started programming over 40 years ago Pascal, Assembler (on mainframes), CLISTS, jCL and modular programming were the newest things. I was constantly learning new languages over the years. Often they were very specific to a given device or environment and unlike anything I had studied before. You need to think about what it is you want to get by studying a language.
If you just want to learn new skills, now I would recommend a functional language like OCAML. On the other hand, if your objective is just to make money and have job security learn ABAP/4 for SAP.
But in either case, expect to learn something new tomorrow. If you have the fundamental concepts down you'll easily adapt and find each successive language comes easier; if not you'll get dead ended and have a career writing the same program over and over.
If you learn the fundamental skills and concepts then you should be able to pick up any language in a short time. The more flexibility you have the better.
Comment Duh (Score 1) 281
Isn't this the same as playing songs on the radio leads to more music sales?
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