Bzomak's comments

I can see Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama working as a one-off TV series, the sort which is 10 or 13 episodes long.

Some which I have re-read recently and still enjoyed:

  William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy

  Frank Herbert's Dune series

  Isaac Asimov's Foundation series

  Frederik Pohl's "Gateway"

  Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a harsh Mistress"

Some which I remember liking when I read them many years ago as a teenager:

  E.E. Doc Smith's Lensman series

  David Brin's Uplift series

  Peter F. Hamilton's Greg Mandel trilogy and The Night's 

Dawn trilogy

  Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"

  George R. Dickson's "Dorsai!"

I have absolutely no problem with them changing the rules and regs between seasons. I find seeing which team/driver rises to the new challenge to be a fascinating part of F!. But it does rather annoy me when they change the rules within a season. That always feels like interference and moving the goalposts...

Indeed! Looking at projects like this and Piston are helping me get to grips with the language in a much more useful manner than working through the various guides/tutorials.

I'm here because I find the various news and discussions about assorted programming languages fascinating. I often find, either posted directly to the site or in the comments, new resources which help me learn more about the languages and technologies I either use or have a passing interest in. A happy side effect is that I gain an understanding of what my numerous friends who make their living by programming are talking about!

I don't particularly care about startups, but then, the beauty of this site is that I don't have to! There's enough here that I find myself perusing the RSS feed and culling stories that, if I had enough time available, I might be interested in. For those articles that I do select, however, I usually read through the associated comment threads, as I find the various opinions and clarifications most enlightening!

"The Heisenberg uncertainly principle means that transporters like the ones in Star Trek are physically impossible, at least in terms of the physics that we understand. But that didn't stop Roddenberry and friends. They just assumed that human beings would figure out some way to "compensate" for the physical laws." From what I've read, that's somewhat of a generous and optimistic view. My understanding was that the transporter was created purely as a money-saving feature, as they didn't have the budget to create planetary landing effects on a weekly basis. The Heisenberg compensator circuits were a convenient piece of techno-babble in an attempt to hand-wave the underlying physics problem of transporters away...

I was lucky enough to learn the BASICs from my father. He, being a mathematician and having dabbled with programming at university, would play around with his own things on the computer in the evening, and I was rather interested in watching him create simple graphical things on the screen.

I think that my first experience was messing around with VRML, learning the mathematical ideas necessary for 3D world manipulation. Once my father saw that I was interested, he showed me some tutorials and documentation (downloaded onto the computer as the internet connection was horrendous), and I gradually learnt to create worlds. The programming part of VRML was the ECMAScript that one could use to control the objects, with which I was able to create and control a Rubik's cube, plot the solar system and stars from star catalogues, and generate patterns using L-Systems. From there, I was introduced to Basic4GL, and then was able to access various programs in some of my father's old fractal books, with explanations from him when needed. The beauty of recursion followed!

I experienced MATLAB, Java, and my favourite, C, at university. All of which was was too newfangled for my father to know anything about. But without his guiding hand when I was younger, I would never have discovered the ever-linked joys and frustrations of programming, and taken the courses that I did later on in life. I count myself lucky that I had someone available to answer my questions and keep me interested, otherwise I would probably have got bored and annoyed far too soon and quit before I'd really got started!