Don't correlate creating games with money. He was really lucky; there were other very similar games on the scene at that time, his just happened to stick.
The observation should really be: creating anything interesting gives you potential to be wealthy.
I'd be careful if I were him. His income is gone as far as I know. Unless he does some smart investing with the current cash reserve he could be broke in ~10 years.
Just an interesting observation; Minecraft was sold for 2.5B $, let's assume Notch got 1.5B $ out of it. Buying that house alone cost him 5% of his entire wealth.
This is an investment. He didn't throw a $70 million party, he bought an asset he can sell in the future and which he presumably thinks will increase in value over time.
And anybody who just became a billionaire is not going to stick that money into a savings account, they will get hooked up with a very good financial advisor who will help them to grow their wealth. Say he has $1 billion, a decent but not great return on that would be 8% a year. That's $80 million! He could buy one of these every year, spend $5 million and still have $5 million left over. And that's exactly how he should and presumably will manage his wealth. You don't spend your wealth, you grow it and spend some of the income it produces. Which is precisely what any rookie financial advisor would teach him on day 1.
The house is an asset. It's a relatively expensive asset to hold (because of risk and maintenance), but it's not all that likely to depreciate by $10 million any time soon, never mind the full value.
He could be broke in 10 minutes, if he turned all his money into $100 bills and burned them, or invested it all in some company that immediately went bankrupt.
But obviously he wouldn't do those things, because they would be stupid. And if he doesn't do stupid things, how is he going to be broke even in 10 years? If his current net wealth is $1B then he'd need to spend $100M every year even assuming zero investment gains. Again, it's not like spending $100M in a year is difficult if you are actively trying to go from being rich to being poor, but it's not the sort of thing that happens by accident.
He can always get a regular programming job again, I doubt he'd have a hard time finding work if he needed it. But yes, once the money starts rolling, they can probably roll pretty fast... just ask MC Hammer. :)
95/98 crashed all the time, xp crashed if you really tried.
Windows 7 hasn't crashed once after two years of daily usage, and/or keeping it running without a restart for months. Even when the system locks up due to user abuse( me ), and would require a reboot on anything older, you just wait a minute and it recovers.
I'd like to throw in my experience with Linux here. My backround is that I used Windows 2000 and XP from 2001 to 2003 after that Linux for three years and then OS X until 2013, now back on Linux.
I bought a used ThinkPad because I heard that that is the hardware which would work best with Linux now and I installed Ubuntu on it. Everything worked ok but just the OS filled up half of my small 128 GB SSD and running only Firefox for browsing got up the load to over 0.5, which made everything not so snappy.
A couple of months ago I moved to archlinux with Gnome 3.x, it was a bit more complicated to install, that I admit, but it was so worth it! After installation the system used less then 3 GB of my SSD, and now running just firefox the load is on about 0.01 which makes this ThinkPad from 2010 one of the snappiest computers I ever used. All animations are smooth, not a single application ever crashed or hanged itself and so on. But yeah admitedly I mostly only do development, email and websurfing on it.
You assumption that a separate case that prints fizzbuzz will break the code is not correct. With correct code, you get three if checks either way, but the readability is higher, code complexity is lower and cases are nicely separated.
A quick search brought me to http://www.bionoren.com/blog/2013/07/unsequenced-modificatio... : 'Basically, the compiler is free to reorder anything and everything until it hits a “sequence point”. Things like return, if, assignment, variable declaration, etc are all sequence points.'
In the parent code sample, it seems the compiler is free to execute "p++" before the "p/102" since there is no sequence point between them.
I was previously unaware of this undefined behavior. Thanks for this, rertrree!
> When you have the superiority the US sports, it's not hard to win a war.
The "War on Terror" started in 2001 and is an ongoing clusterfuck. As the "War on Terror" hasn't concluded, the last war that the US won was Kosovo in 1999.
I suggest you read on North Korean military equipment, supplies and operational readiness.
It is all about the details:
They have the largest submarine force in the world; but every one of them is an outdated diesel-electric.
They have a couple hundred fighter airplanes, but their trained pilots get 10-20 hours of practice every year.
And so on...
They aren't capable of a prolonged attack as they don't have enough food( literally ). At best they can defend for a long time and cause a lot of collateral damage with chemical weapons and short range nukes, which is enough to keep their enemies away.
No, I attempted to be very, very specific in what I was claiming.
The US could win the "War on Terror" any time: kill vast quantities of people, as many as it takes, and or whatever it takes (up to and including destroying their culture, wiping out their identity; see: Tibet, or Japan, or what ancient empires did). That's how people were typically truly defeated historically. Whether we're talking about Alexander, the Romans, the Mongols, Nazi Germany, the USSR, etc. One of the few exceptions would be the British Empire, they did a lot less sheer mass murdering.
It is not a question of if the US can win, it's a question of: what is the US willing to do to win.
You can name the number of countries that could stop the US from bombing them perpetually, on one hand. I'm not over-estimating US superiority, I'm proclaiming that the US isn't willing to use any and all tactics to win.
The future of transportation is; separate different modes of transportation as much as possible.
When I was younger, I was regularly biking in between the car lanes( sometimes very risky ), skipping the bicycle paths since they were much slower or simply missing. I would almost always get there before I would with a car or a bus, and parking wasn't a problem. If the lanes were completely separated this could be done safely.
From my experience the roundabouts where the bicycle lane isn't separated, are the least safe for bicyclists, out of any type of intersection. I think the cause is that apart from normal intersections with stop signs or lights, where stopping is the usual procedure, the roundabouts are fluid where drivers stop much less and thus "prefer" not to stop or just think they have the right of way.
Just as important as junction design is driver education. In the Netherlands they focus very hard on driving safely with respect to cyclists. A big part of that is indeed roundabouts. An average driving course will make you practice driving safely on different types of roundabouts many many times, and the main focus is on avoiding accidents with cyclists. This is important because on most roundabouts the cyclists do have priority when they are going around the roundabout over a car who is leaving or entering the roundabout, and cyclists will take that priority without a second thought because they know that the driver will stop as he/she should.
This also means that it can be hard to pass a driving exam for foreigners who already have a drivers license in their home country. I know several people who have failed the exam multiple times despite driving for years in their home country.
Rather off topic, but have you already considered that the obligation of a driver's license is against the hacker ethics and thus hackers should campaign for an abolition of driver's licenses?
"Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!"
"We don't have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don't have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big
bucketful of SCADA controllers [laughter]; a 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it's a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software."
this rule should also apply to cars. Also for point 3 of Levy's hacker ethics
"Mistrust authority—promote decentralization"
it is clear how an mandatory driver's licenses violates it, since there is a central authority which allows/disallows driving.
To state one thing clear: If you want to drive a vehicle, I strongly recommend taking some driving lessons. But making a driver's license madatory is a clear violation of the hacker ethics and any hacker or supporter of the hacking scene should make in no uncertain manner clear that they espouse an abolition of mandatory driver's licenses.
You're arguing against trusting authority while insisting we all should do exactly what Steven Levy tells us to do.
Also, a drivers' license doesn't deny one access to a car, nor does it deny one the ability to drive (except perhaps legally.) So I fail to see how requiring a license to drive limits a hackers' access to the computer in a car in any meaningful way.
You could just as well argue we should all steal anything with a chip in it because stores are limiting access to electronic goods by requiring people to pay for them. Or that every network in existence which employs any privileged access (passwords, sudo, etc) violates that ethic because by definition, they're denying someone access to some part of the code.
The hacker ethic is fine and all, but like anything, once you take it too far it just becomes another form of fascism.
Roundabouts differ wildy in design, sometimes a separate bike path is better and sometimes its better to be unseparated. In my experience (I've biked in several European countries) the most important parts of unseparated roundabout biking is to take the lane (to reduce the right-hook risk) and signal clearly.
About the video; the thing that sets Netherlands (and Denmark, IIRC) is that bike lanes have right-of-way. Separating bike traffic into a generally slower infrastructure, and then slowing it down further by giving cars right-of-way is contraproductive - if the goal is to increase biking.
"From my experience" really goes against empirical evidence in many cases. This happens with traffic safety just as well.
The Dutch have built a system that avoids several 9/11s in traffic deaths per year. Their traffic safety policy is evidence based, more so than most places in the world. I wish local politicians here and everywhere else would learn from it more!
Younger I used to do the same, that was before I learned to drive. I'll never ride that way ever again. It's dangerous for everyone, as a driver I have to anxiously check every bike because they may cross streams at any point in the future.
Pedestrians don't really use the road, they cross it from time to time (of course we should all be extra careful about them). Bikes can be everywhere, pass you from behind, between lanes, pass red lights at high speed etc etc. I don't want to bump one into incoming traffic.
