True, but the 65XE itself was still essentially just an updated Atari 800. I intentionally mentioned the latter, as a general audience is more likely to have heard of it, and it makes the lineage clearer.
Atari certainly did a lot of repacking the same old hardware. I used several XL cartridges on the XE Games System without issue. And to upgrade to a 'real' XE computer, all you needed was a disk drive.
Flight Simulator 2 was bundled and that was awesome - fly under the Golden Gate Bridge and round the Statue of Liberty, then engage in a WWI dogfight, all in 2MHz 8-bit chunkiness.
The light gun was also good for a laugh. Light guns are about the only thing I miss about CRT TVs.
Missile Command came built-in, but unfortunately didn't use the light gun.
Yes, that - have kids and then game with them. Give the lady a break to do her own stuff.
Just be sure to pick games that are age-appropriate and don't dwell on them once the educational potential has been extracted. (Pretty much any game has at least *some* educational potential.)
damage to the brain due to the stroke, coma, and brain tumor she suffered at age 4 (right before she stopped developing) could be a more likely cause than her particular genetic makeup.
I'd say you likely nailed it there, sir.
There may be some mutation that led to the tumor, but the chances of that mutation leading to the same symptoms again could well be miniscule. Even if she were to be cloned, that is.
After all, the biological systems we're talking about here are unfathomably complex, and so are their failure modes.
New Zealand here used/uses 111, but that was at the long end of the dial, so took 9 clicks rather than 1. Not easy to dial accidentally, but unfortunately slow to dial deliberately.
If you tried to dial 999 (being the UK emergency number), rather than emergency services, you'd get a recorded message instructing you to dial 111. I always thought that was dumb, but your explanation makes sense.
Then again, IIRC, dialling 911 also gave the recorded message, to cries of 'Just put me through already, I'm dying here!'.
It'd be good for a laugh to try some of these approaches out. Wouldn't take much - maybe some PIL code to take a full-color bitmap, encode, and then convert back to full-color. Then compare results.
Looking back on some Amiga game art, I'm sure some of the better ones were on to the two-dimensional-color-space trick (e.g. cyan/red rather than RGB) for their palette selections. Limiting the color space can work well as a stylistic concern (e.g. give the game an 'old movie look') as well as giving better color resolution.
Commenting on the color resolution, on the Amiga with (for simplicity) Extra Halfbrite mode (32 color palette plus an extra set at half brightness), for a three-color space you can get 4x4x4 possibilities, whereas for a two-color space you can get 8x8. That is, lose one color and double the resolution on the other two.
BTW, I fully appreciate the irony that I posted an off-topic rant about obscure technical details of interest to no-one but myself against a story titled 'No More Asperger's Syndrome'.
That sounds good, but the devil in the details is how you map the HSV space on to 12 bits.
Presumably they had this as 4+4+4, just as they ended up with for RGB. Now, 4 bits of hue would be pretty limiting, as you'd have just 16 distinct hues compared to the 96 hues that RGB had at maximum saturation and value.
A perceptually better alternative might be 6+3+3, but as HAM works on 4+4+4 this would take multiple pixels to set just H, S or V (and we were hoping to do this with one pixel).
Taking that 6+3+3 idea a step further, the bits could be interleaved so that one HAM pixel gets you to the ballpark, and the following one or two pixels refines it, e.g.:
Likewise, stock prices don't directly help companies, contrary to what the submitter says.
I previously brainstormed some counterexamples here, of reasons why companies are affected by their own share price.
Another thing to add is that a company's share price can affect its inclusion or placement in stock indexes (e.g. S&P 500), which I'm sure would have some effect on brand value (it's free advertising). A low share price or market cap can even get you booted off the exchange.
Hedgehogs here in NZ are a lot cockier than they were 30 years ago. They used to roll up into a ball when frightened (e.g., caught in headlights), but now they'll likely run away instead.
I also see them less as roadkill. I expect this is explained partly by smaller populations, due to loss of habitat, roadkill, disease, etc, but also behavioural change seems to be a factor.
This isn't science, just my anecdotal observation. If anyone has citations, please share.
Yup, that's the use case that gives you gorilla arm - vertical screen in front of you.
I suspect the claim that touchscreens on notebook give you gorilla arm are either fabrications or a genuine misunderstanding.
I doubt there's a big fundamental difference between touching a notebook screen and using a tablet, at least in terms of where the screen is. A lot of people prop their tablets up in a similar position to a notebook screen anyway.
One concern I do have is that the notebook needs to absorb the torque of a firm prod near the top of the screen. Having to be gentle in order to avoid tipping the notebook would lead to extra muscle strain.
At first glance this means the hinge needs to be extra stiff (and/or lockable), and the notebook base needs to be extra heavy (and/or anchored). Aside from the touchscreen consideration, these are all bad design for a notebook. A foldout back support, like on a photo frame, might be better.
I honestly thought that 'free software' was both 'as in beer' (distribution charges aside) and 'as in speech'. That makes it a brand new sense of the word, not yet in any dictionary - 'free' as in 'free software'.
But then a quick fact check revealed that 'free software' is just 'as in speech', and not 'as in beer'.
Sigh... maybe there really is no such thing as 'free software'. As in 'lunch'.
The silly thing is that having a default value of NULL and having no default value (effectively defaulting the default value to NULL) commonly aren't the same thing.
It's just the sort of nasty little corner case that breeds bugs. Like when many years ago Sybase's bulk loader entered random data when inserting NULL into a column with a default of NULL, and ruined our week. With no default, it would've worked fine.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but the 65XE itself was still essentially just an updated Atari 800. I intentionally mentioned the latter, as a general audience is more likely to have heard of it, and it makes the lineage clearer.
Atari certainly did a lot of repacking the same old hardware. I used several XL cartridges on the XE Games System without issue. And to upgrade to a 'real' XE computer, all you needed was a disk drive.
Flight Simulator 2 was bundled and that was awesome - fly under the Golden Gate Bridge and round the Statue of Liberty, then engage in a WWI dogfight, all in 2MHz 8-bit chunkiness.
The light gun was also good for a laugh. Light guns are about the only thing I miss about CRT TVs.
Missile Command came built-in, but unfortunately didn't use the light gun.
Done reminiscing.
released the XE Games System (an updated Atari 800 without a keyboard)
Actually did have a detachable keyboard, and closer to the 130XE (actually 65XE) than the 800.
It was pretty lousy compared to the NES. Ironically my favourite game on it was Mario Bros. Yep, a Nintendo game on non-Nintendo hardware ;-)
Yes, that - have kids and then game with them. Give the lady a break to do her own stuff.
Just be sure to pick games that are age-appropriate and don't dwell on them once the educational potential has been extracted. (Pretty much any game has at least *some* educational potential.)
And it should be possible to use a hacked Mega client that lies about the pre-encryption hash.
I take it you haven't watched videos of Asimo trying to climb stairs.
damage to the brain due to the stroke, coma, and brain tumor she suffered at age 4 (right before she stopped developing) could be a more likely cause than her particular genetic makeup.
I'd say you likely nailed it there, sir.
There may be some mutation that led to the tumor, but the chances of that mutation leading to the same symptoms again could well be miniscule. Even if she were to be cloned, that is.
After all, the biological systems we're talking about here are unfathomably complex, and so are their failure modes.
And then there's Barbie as Rapunzel.
(I lost it at 'Furby as Ghandi'. See how far you get.)
People see 'whom' in print, so they start using it to make themselves look smart.
A few examples from my work email:
To those whom care...
We need to get information from whomever is looking after it.
Whomever has the trophy, can you please bring it to my desk.
Can whomever at you decide should pick this up give me a call.
Can I ask whomever coded it to have a look?
New Zealand here used/uses 111, but that was at the long end of the dial, so took 9 clicks rather than 1. Not easy to dial accidentally, but unfortunately slow to dial deliberately.
If you tried to dial 999 (being the UK emergency number), rather than emergency services, you'd get a recorded message instructing you to dial 111. I always thought that was dumb, but your explanation makes sense.
Then again, IIRC, dialling 911 also gave the recorded message, to cries of 'Just put me through already, I'm dying here!'.
Logging is a good candidate for Haskell's 'get out of FP jail free' function, unsafePerformIO.
Apparently there's a standard function Debug.Trace.trace for this.
It'd be good for a laugh to try some of these approaches out. Wouldn't take much - maybe some PIL code to take a full-color bitmap, encode, and then convert back to full-color. Then compare results.
Looking back on some Amiga game art, I'm sure some of the better ones were on to the two-dimensional-color-space trick (e.g. cyan/red rather than RGB) for their palette selections. Limiting the color space can work well as a stylistic concern (e.g. give the game an 'old movie look') as well as giving better color resolution.
Commenting on the color resolution, on the Amiga with (for simplicity) Extra Halfbrite mode (32 color palette plus an extra set at half brightness), for a three-color space you can get 4x4x4 possibilities, whereas for a two-color space you can get 8x8. That is, lose one color and double the resolution on the other two.
BTW, I fully appreciate the irony that I posted an off-topic rant about obscure technical details of interest to no-one but myself against a story titled 'No More Asperger's Syndrome'.
That sounds good, but the devil in the details is how you map the HSV space on to 12 bits.
Presumably they had this as 4+4+4, just as they ended up with for RGB. Now, 4 bits of hue would be pretty limiting, as you'd have just 16 distinct hues compared to the 96 hues that RGB had at maximum saturation and value.
A perceptually better alternative might be 6+3+3, but as HAM works on 4+4+4 this would take multiple pixels to set just H, S or V (and we were hoping to do this with one pixel).
Taking that 6+3+3 idea a step further, the bits could be interleaved so that one HAM pixel gets you to the ballpark, and the following one or two pixels refines it, e.g.:
H5 H4 S2 V2 | H3 H2 S1 V1 | H1 H0 S0 V0
or if that makes the hues too smudgy, maybe:
H5 H4 H3 H2 | H1 H0 S2 V2 | S1 S0 V1 V0
OK I'm living in the past.
Likewise, stock prices don't directly help companies, contrary to what the submitter says.
I previously brainstormed some counterexamples here, of reasons why companies are affected by their own share price.
Another thing to add is that a company's share price can affect its inclusion or placement in stock indexes (e.g. S&P 500), which I'm sure would have some effect on brand value (it's free advertising). A low share price or market cap can even get you booted off the exchange.
There's always been a little shit in the chocolate.
Tangential, but the story of how E.T. featured Reece's Pieces instead of M&Ms is a good yarn: http://www.snopes.com/business/market/mandms.asp
I wonder what the Darwinian impact of motorcycles was on human gene stock in the 20th century...
Hedgehogs here in NZ are a lot cockier than they were 30 years ago. They used to roll up into a ball when frightened (e.g., caught in headlights), but now they'll likely run away instead.
I also see them less as roadkill. I expect this is explained partly by smaller populations, due to loss of habitat, roadkill, disease, etc, but also behavioural change seems to be a factor.
This isn't science, just my anecdotal observation. If anyone has citations, please share.
Yup, that's the use case that gives you gorilla arm - vertical screen in front of you.
I suspect the claim that touchscreens on notebook give you gorilla arm are either fabrications or a genuine misunderstanding.
I doubt there's a big fundamental difference between touching a notebook screen and using a tablet, at least in terms of where the screen is. A lot of people prop their tablets up in a similar position to a notebook screen anyway.
One concern I do have is that the notebook needs to absorb the torque of a firm prod near the top of the screen. Having to be gentle in order to avoid tipping the notebook would lead to extra muscle strain.
At first glance this means the hinge needs to be extra stiff (and/or lockable), and the notebook base needs to be extra heavy (and/or anchored). Aside from the touchscreen consideration, these are all bad design for a notebook. A foldout back support, like on a photo frame, might be better.
Powergen Italia could've done with a strategic hyphen insertion too.
What to teach Spaun: that it was intelligently designed, or evolved from its predecessors?
Intelligently designed, and that it had better fucking behave itself or watch out!
s/Bugs Bunny/Eric Carle/
I started out serious, but posted ironic.
I honestly thought that 'free software' was both 'as in beer' (distribution charges aside) and 'as in speech'. That makes it a brand new sense of the word, not yet in any dictionary - 'free' as in 'free software'.
But then a quick fact check revealed that 'free software' is just 'as in speech', and not 'as in beer'.
Sigh... maybe there really is no such thing as 'free software'. As in 'lunch'.
The silly thing is that having a default value of NULL and having no default value (effectively defaulting the default value to NULL) commonly aren't the same thing.
It's just the sort of nasty little corner case that breeds bugs. Like when many years ago Sybase's bulk loader entered random data when inserting NULL into a column with a default of NULL, and ruined our week. With no default, it would've worked fine.
Not ambiguous really... you say 'free software', it's clear from context that by 'free' you mean 'free as in software'.