Drum memory predates the Sinclair by quite a while. But there is an often repeated story involving an impossibly-optimised Blackjack program for a drum memory computer called “The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer”.
I sympathize with the point of the article, but if someone’s seriously citing Flash, which had widespread success for a run of about 15 years before being overtaken by later developments (driven in part by a billionaire with an axe to grind), as a short-lived “dead end” that was best avoided, then how long do they think is a sensible amount of time to wait to see if something’s worth spending time and effort? Nothing remains on top forever.
I think that the big, highlighted quote a few paragraphs down–which I believe is also by the author of the article, even though they refer to themselves in the third person–seems somewhat at odds with what they say in the rest of the article. I would guess that they started writing it to make an emotional argument, then tried to back it up with logic, but along the way they lost their emotional momentum and forgot exactly what they were supposed to be arguing.
There’s an interesting section further down, though:
What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn’t let it, anyway.
There’s no need to get it back in the barn; the thing is lame, and only being kept propped up by a lot of (cash) injections and diversions. The facade will fall before they actually get it to work the way they pretend it works.
It’s the first law that I’m aware of that legally requires an automated system that you own and operate to snitch on you at any time, to anyone who asks, without asking your permission.
For the moment, it only has to report a piece of data that you are free to lie about. For the moment.
You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.
It’s like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.
Frieren (Sousou no Furiren, "Frieren and the Funeral). It’s about what happens after the quest is finished. The elven mage Frieren was part of a band of adventurers that defeated the big bad many years ago. Before the party splits up and she goes off to travel the world studying magic, the group all agree to meet again in the future, after many years.
This is where the main story starts. Due to her elven heritage, Frieren has hardly aged at all. When she comes back, she’s just in time to see the human leader of the old party one last time before he dies, and she attends his funeral. She goes searching for the other old party members, and along the way she accidentally picks up some new friends and becomes the leader of a new party, having various adventures and run-ins with new bad guys.
The Mikado Method, eh?
(All together)
Three junior devs at work are we,
Busy and harried as devs can be,
Compiler warnings flowing freely,
Three junior devs at work!
(Alice) Everything is a source of bugs! (Laughter)
(Bob) When they wrote this, were they on drugs? (Laughter)
(Carlos) Don’t touch our “World’s Best Coder” mugs! (Laughter)
(All together) Three junior devs at work!
My apologies; I misunderstood your concept. I thought that you were talking about setting up some kind of central clearing house for funds, but now I see that you’re suggesting more of an automated report which is compiled for each user, locally, for them to act on manually at periodic intervals. That does seem to sidestep most of the legal issues.
Is the main issue really tracking and consolidating microdonations, or is it transferring credit between these donation systems and traditional finance entities like banks and credit card networks?
From what I’ve seen, efforts to develop microtransaction/microdonation systems generally seem to have trouble with regulatory compliance, either through legitimate legal requirements that force them to do things that seem nonsensical to their users (My guess is that the registered servers issue OP mentioned with Flattr came down to this), or due to greedy intermediaries stalling and witholding under false pretences while they hold out for a bigger share of the money, without appreciating the already extremely thin margins involved.
SDL is written in C, but bindings are available for multiple languages, including C++ and C#. As it happens I was actually using it with C++. And there are other libraries you could use instead, like GLFW or Allegro.
I’ve never thought of C as being that much lower-level than C++, but I guess everything’s relative.
the cross platform is a pain.
It doesn’t have to be with libraries like SDL. Years ago I got stuck fighting all-in-one game engines that didn’t fit my design choices, precisely because I thought it would be worth it for platform independence. Then I found out about SDL, which was what I actually wanted.
If someone thinks that not using a pre-rolled engine with a full editing suite included is a waste of time, I can respect that. But there are options if you’d rather make your own but still don’t want to have to learn the ins and outs of multiple hardware architectures and operating systems.
Anyone who is already familiar with HSR, imagine seeing this video and having it be the first time you’ve even heard of Homestar Runner.
You’d probably feel like some kind of tapeleg.
I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing “VIbc coam” on the spine.
People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.
Cheers to the person who linked to the “font - hide” solution. I didn’t know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.
The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only “valid” for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.
He sure loves to evangelise “cloning”, a.k.a. “copying other people’s work”. One wonders how anything new or even slightly tailored for each situation will creep into this ecosystem.
To make an analogy, there’s usually nothing terribly wrong with the mass-produced clothes that big box stores sell. But it rarely fits that well, looks too stylish, or does much more than cover your nakedness. Often, that’s acceptable. But sometimes you need special gear or want a really good quality, tailored shirt.
People still make a living as tailors. In fact, a lot of their work these days is making small alterations to the mass-produced stuff for individual clients.
My first suspect is an incorrectly-terminated statement which looks like it should end on line 41. The compiler/interpreter probably read the newline and ticked over before uncovering the error, and didn’t recover properly due to some edge case.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I used to believe that if I thought of something that I’d never heard of before, I must have been the first person ever to come up with it.
Now that I’m older and the Internet is ubiquitous, when I have those moments I go straight to a search engine. And even if I’m not the first, I still feel pretty good about discovering whatever it is for myself.
A little while ago in a retrogaming community, someone asked why Atari 2600 games always ran at 60fps when even NES games sometimes had slowdown. It was explained that the video system in the 2600 isn’t independent of the main CPU as it is in other consoles, so if the game program doesn’t keep updating the display with correct timing, it gets scrambled.
Truly no choice!