Excellent article. I like how the author's head turned to Star Wars at the face of death lol. I wonder if there's any similar kind of deviant thinking among hackers.
What about an online meeting? On an IRC channel? Can a hacker working on a project multitask and attend the IRC meeting while simultaneously coding (perhaps he has 2 monitors, he codes on the larger one and IRCs on the other one) ?
I believe work is the source of happiness. Happiness comes to you when you see the fruits of your work.
I remember feeling really happy after finishing up a program that I had been working on for a long time. Just seeing it work so perfectly gave me an incredible sense of satisfaction. It was far better from the satisfaction/pleasure I got from doing things like watching TV/movies, going on dates, eating at nice restaurants, etc.
Developing the program was definitely not play either. It involved things (like fixing bugs, coming up with algorithms) for which I had to expend a considerable amount of intellectual energy. It was work, but it was work worth working on.
Well I wrote (a command-line) program that was about 2000 lines long in C++ and during most of the development period I used g++ with the -ansi & -pedantic options.
Later I was able to get my program to compile on Visual C++ with absolutely no modification.
C++ has a high price in terms of binary incompatibility.
I find this statement to be rather untrue because I think most modern compilers when forced to be ISO/ANSI compliant (i do: g++ -ansi -pedantic) ensure your code is portable across systems.