I installed Win10 on one of our PCs and noticed a big step backward from 8.1. We had the "Family Safety" installed to limit our kids access time. After the installation I was looking for the settings to see whether they have been ported correctly and learned a) There is no local Family Safety feature anymore, b) it is only available if both the parents and the kids have Microsoft accounts, c) even then, features like "give them another 15 minutes to finish that level" are gone (you can give them additional time, but you have to login to Microsoft for that, and if you forget to take this back later, the addition is permanent, because you can only change the daily total time), and d) the kids can easily use the local account instead to simply disable all limitations.
I tried it, and I'm wondering what the hype is about. Not because of the idea, which is nice, but the implementation, which totally sucks. Very regular and very annoying crashes that waste items, severe server problems, burning through the battery as if it was calculating PI to a gazillion digits (this app is the only one to make my phone *hot*!), etc.
For some in-game advances (hatching pokemon-eggs) you have to walk certain distances. Ok, I know my regular morning walk distance, which is 2.4km. I had to restart this app eight times during this course, and it only "got" about 1.5km due to that fact that it does not count while being crashed (crashing is not that obvious, the display still follows your path on then virtual map, but the background process(es) that count distance, provide new pokemons, or allow intercations or item access is/are gone). Or you try to catch a pokemon - you spend a bunch of those "pokeballs" to catch it, and when you got it, the game freezes. The pokeballs are gone, and of course the pokemon is, too, after you restart the app. Well, and restarting (or starting in the first place) is just trying your luck. During the day it is "just" difficult to start, but after work or on weekends, the app does not even complete the loading screen. It usually hangs at the point where it connects to their server(s?) and thats it. As the server capacity problems have not been fixed after a week, I guess the server side simply does not scale (which perfectly matches the apps quality). That I get the game to start during my walk might be due to the fact that I walk while most of the teenagers are still in bed;-)
Worse of all, people complained about the loss of bought items (e.g. you can buy those pokeballs if you are to impatient to "harvest" them), so I and maybe some other, more cautious people will wait for the software to getting into proper production status before spending a single cent on anything).
The version number of the app tells an developer that this software is basically not ready for production (0.29.2, a clear indicator for it being beta, if not alpha), and as unripe and buggy it is, it is an insult to the user. No reaction to the bug reports (they just generate an auto-answer that they won't reply to bug reports), and nearly 200k users giving that app only one star due to the bugs. And even those who give more stars more often than not complain that the app is buggy. I don't understand those idiots - If an app crashes regularly, why do they give five stars?
All in all, a nice new gaming idea, but with a total failure of an implementation. I have not heard of the development company (Niantic, Inc.) before, but from this experience, I would not let them develop even a "hello, world!" program for me.
I work at the real bottom of it. While other people think about "which OS (version) do I have to work on?", I sometimes don't even have a processor to work with. I do FPGAs with VHDL, ARM CPUs in C and assembler, usually without any OS at all (think graphical UI on a machine with 2 kilobytes of RAM!), maybe with some library routines (not a full OS) for networking. Sometimes I have to work on the PC side of things, so I have a good part of my build chain (anything after the C and VHDL compilers to create update packages, etc), the communication libraries for my PC programmers, or simple tools in C and Perl, and sometimes BASH. And if it comes to worse, I do a bit of SQL, PHP, HTML, and even Lotus Script.
Switching between VHDL and C is so common, at the moment I have two VHDL and one C project open, and I work both - usually, while the VHDL synthesizes (10-15 minutes for one build), I write the test routines in C.
And in the next iteration, account names will be mandatory, together with the passwords for them (verified on the spot by your friendly customs people) and the PINs for your banking cards?
The PSA (Paranoid States of America) still shit their pants because of one terrorist incident a decade ago, while local yokels with guns (including the police) kill ten times that much people per year.
The HP books have a certain information density to them, so I dropped the speed of reading them down to about 100 to 120 pages per hour, And I have read them in English, which is not my native language. You could have quizzed me back then, and I would expect not to have failed (I actually won a radio quiz on the first HP volume which I had read weeks ago). Because I do read, not skim the text.
I've always been a fast reader. I actually started reading English books as an adolescent to reduce my reading speed (I'm not a native speaker of the English tongue). Even as a kid I did not need my members passes at the local libraries (they all knew me), and I was exempt from rule "children may only borrow two book at a time". In university, I attended a course on speed reading for fun, and my initial test was way faster than the tutors, and I still managed to gain an additional 10-20% boost by the course.
So I read about 100-200 pages per hour in English and 600-800 pages per hour in German. All while remembering a lot of details and enjoying fine points that even 'normal' readers might miss. I can sit down with the Lord of the Rings right after lunch and have read it by dinner, and still see the fine linguistic differences between the individual people in Middle Earth. And you can ask me about different scenes, and I can e.g. tell you that this scene is about _here_, on the lower left side.
This is also quite power consuming, i.e. my heart frequency and body temperature rises, and I actually absolutely cannot do this with a clogged-up nose, making having a cold many times as miserable...
I would not say that I miss out on things because of the speed reading - I do not skim, I _do_ read. And having information and storylines 'more present' due to the short temporal distances usually helps understanding a story better. I cannot imagine how people can cope with a story like Ted Williams Otherland when they have to spread reading it over weeks and months - all the issues of normal life in between reading a few pages here and there must be horrible (I spread reading the series over four days).
Over time, the detail knowledge of a story fades, of course, usually after having read some more books in the mean time. But something is always kept, and pops up when I re-read a book, or when I need the knowledge.
Have you ever tried to get a GPS signal inside a house (A real house, not cardboard or wood)? No chance.
We've got a time signal here called DCF77, which is quite strong and reliable (at least since tube TVs went the way of the dodo), and I even get a sufficient signal in my concrete basement.
Disclaimer: I'm a so-called LEGO Ambassador, i.e. I represent my LUG (Lego User Group) to LEGO, but I'm not a representative and/or work for LEGO itself.
LEGO is very interested in this 3D printing topic and had a workgroup on this on the Ambassador forum. I did not participate in this workgroup, but I can give some of the results. None of them come as a surprise, if one thinks this topic over, though, so I'm not telling any secrets.
- for standard bricks, it is too expensive, and except for a few classical basic bricks, there are patent and copyright issues. - for bricks that do not exist from LEGO, this may work, but color, clutch power, surface structure, and durability are nearly impossible to match with current technologies - best use for 3D printed stuff is to technically link LEGO parts to other things, e.g. a RasPi case that can be connected to a LEGO technik frame, where color and surface structures don't matter at all, and clutch power does not matter that much - A lot of 3D stuff is accessories for Minifigs, like tools, weapons, hair pieces, etc.
Basically, while there are thousands of 3D data sets for LEGO parts available on the net, actually printing a box of bricks to build is far from being practical.
LEGO uses 3D printing in their design process, but only for prototyping. They are more likely to cut and glue existing parts for the prototyping, though, as this is still faster and better.
When I see those phone-junkies getting younger and younger, and kids having problems letting their phone go even for a short period of time, a blanket ban of Facebook & Co for minors in general would be an excellent idea.
We have an application where we still need a real serial connection. USB serial adapters have too much brain for their own good, and don't cut it in realtime scenarios.
And from the embedded point of view, a UART can bed one with a handful of registers, maybe an interrupt, and a few lines of code, even in assembly. For talking USB, I need a whole protocol stack with hundreds of things I never ever need.
What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches? - The Quarterly Review, March 1825.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895
640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981
I admit that humans are going to Mars to settle. But there, human space travel will end. - Louis Friedman (1941-), Engineer, in 2015
So if one is e.g. discussing how much money the government wasted, and wasted, and wasted again will lower the posters credit score? Primarily, the money was wasted on the banks that use the customer scoring in turn.
About 30 years ago, we already had pocket calculators in school. My elder sister, though, still had a book about calculating with a slide rule. I managed to get the book from her and a slide rule from someone else, and started exploring. Being the math geek in class, I could afford a bit of risk, so I brought the slide rule to a test where all my classmates used calculators (I still had mine in the bag in case the teacher would forbid using the slide rule). You should have seen the faces when I used that "plastic thingie" - and still was the first to finish, and later got the top score in class (again). Some even accused me of cheating, but the teacher was quite amused about it.
It was a fun experience, and I could even teach other people about it in university - we had a giant, working slide rule (a few meters long, probably an old demonstration device from a lecture room once) as a decoration on a wall.
Because not adhering to the red book standard can be interpreted as being "intentionally defective". Which was the legal way to go until SONY caved in and started to replace the CDs.
I'm one ofthe old dogs. I have to admit that App development and such is not my kind of things. But I do have experience. LOADS of it. When I see the fundamental mistakes by young "talented" programmers, it makes me cringe.
Just a few days ago, there was a kickoff meeting for a new project. This project needs multi-user support on the long run - everyone in the team admits that. And access control, with all its implications like "how to I check a password", "how do I store a password", "which kind of permission do I need to call this function". Which they never ever did before. None of them had ever heard of books like "Applied Cryprography". There is a copy here, on my shelf. Actually, it is my second book, the first was worn down due to heavy use. All they cared for was "Licence Management", but I'm not sure if they understand how this works properly. I offered them to ride piggyback on the existing licence management scheme I've implemented in my part of the system, but this was probably too unsexy, because it cannot add licences on the fly over the web, at least not "just so".
My experience tells me (and anyone who has been around for long enough) that any software that will need this kind of multiuser support needs to have this built-in from the very beginning. The very concepts of the software must be aware of the possibility that e.g. a call might fail for lack of permissions. Communication protocols must be designed in a way that they guarantee to a sufficient degree that one side has proper identification presented to the other side to be permitted to do this, and don't that. This is nothing that can be added lateron without SERIOUS headaches, problems, and, worst of all, risks. Windows9x was the living prrof of such a mistake.
Reply from the "young talent": Implementing multi-user is too time consuming at the moment, we will add it later. *FACEDESK*
Math, and its application, never was a strength of the economists. Nor was or is logical reasoning or application of scientific methods.
Ages ago, I made a fake economics whitepaper. It looked like the stuff I've seen in their libraries, the text was equally braindead, and it contained a lot of made-up formulas. The formulas were completely irrelevant (as was the text), but if anyone had followed the pattern to read the "input data" in the text before and actually pass it through the shown calculations, he would have noticed a) that the actual result did not match whatever was written in the text, and b) that all formulas resulted in an 8-digit number (with the decimal point in varying places) like 1991.0401 or 199104.01 (I'm no longer sure aboute the "1991" part, it could have been "1992" or "1993", don't care).
Of course this ended up in their library, along with a matching card in the index (they still had a paper-based index back then).
I actually got asked by someone if he could base his doctoral thesis on my "phenomenal" findings. I told him to do the math, and contact me again if he still considered this a good idea.
I built a C64 expansion card containing 256KB of EPROM and 256KB or RAM that I could use via bank switching. As I had no fancy layout tool back then, I had to draw the layout in a paint program (taking into account that the nine needle dot matrix printer had a 216x256 raster!), matching both sides manually, print it, find a photocopier that actually reduced the size by 50% without bending it totally out of shape (I learned the hard way that photocopiers back then had the habit of being a bit fish.eyed when it comes to resizing), make the PCB, and drill a gazillion holes with a hand-kranked drill. Most vias were placed wherver there were wired elements or sockets, but quite a few vias had to be made by soldering a bit of wire on both sides. A horrible hack job in retrospective, but it worked flawlessly from the beginning!
Yes, I am aware that pigeons are birds and therefor a different domain as mammals, and that there might be some differences in the biochemistry here, but I hope they work something out to get those flying rats under control.
The VW (and probably others, I don't believe that only VW cheated - What miracle did they all work in unison to be 30x better with emissions than VW?) problem is the engine, not the general "Car Intelligence". I believe that the VW scandal will lead to more electric cars in the future (not electic replacing diesel, but a shift where gasoline enters the diesel domain, while at the other end electric engines cut their margin of the gasoline market).
What will happen in the future, though, is that the certification authorities will want to see, examine and understand the source code. Which will not only prolong the certification, but also make it way more expensive. It will also force the car manufacturers to cleanly separate the engine control domain from the other control domains in the car, so they can limit the skope of openness to this one domain only.
Whether an Apple gaming console is any good or not is totally besides the point. If Apple builds and sells something, there are more than enought brainwashed idiots (AKA Apple disciples) standing in line on release date to buy it.
Look at the iWatch - A nice attempt to look cool, but everyone ignored the fact that current technology (even Apples) cannot deliver what a useable smartwatch would need. Still, they sold quite a lot of them, until the market reality cought up and finally found that the concept is bonkers from the very beginning.
So if Apple builds a gaming console, of course hoards of idiots will queue on release night just because its Apple, not because its a useable product. As with the iWatch, they will be disappointed shortly after, as CandyCrush on a TV will not be the thing that would drive a console market. The top games and game development companies are already tied to real consoles with an existing market and infrastructure, so Apple would have to start from scratch in a market that will fight any newcomer tooth and nail.
TL;DR: Apple does not live of phones or consoles, but on idiots with too much money. Quality or common sense have long ceased to be arguments here.
Slashdot Mirror
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
So? I've got a "#define APU_CONST_ONE (0x01000000)" in my code, and it is perfectly OK (for a fixed point arithmetic number).
Yes, there is one (well, at least one).
I installed Win10 on one of our PCs and noticed a big step backward from 8.1. We had the "Family Safety" installed to limit our kids access time. After the installation I was looking for the settings to see whether they have been ported correctly and learned a) There is no local Family Safety feature anymore, b) it is only available if both the parents and the kids have Microsoft accounts, c) even then, features like "give them another 15 minutes to finish that level" are gone (you can give them additional time, but you have to login to Microsoft for that, and if you forget to take this back later, the addition is permanent, because you can only change the daily total time), and d) the kids can easily use the local account instead to simply disable all limitations.
A typical Microsoft fuckup.
I tried it, and I'm wondering what the hype is about. Not because of the idea, which is nice, but the implementation, which totally sucks. Very regular and very annoying crashes that waste items, severe server problems, burning through the battery as if it was calculating PI to a gazillion digits (this app is the only one to make my phone *hot*!), etc.
For some in-game advances (hatching pokemon-eggs) you have to walk certain distances. Ok, I know my regular morning walk distance, which is 2.4km. I had to restart this app eight times during this course, and it only "got" about 1.5km due to that fact that it does not count while being crashed (crashing is not that obvious, the display still follows your path on then virtual map, but the background process(es) that count distance, provide new pokemons, or allow intercations or item access is/are gone). Or you try to catch a pokemon - you spend a bunch of those "pokeballs" to catch it, and when you got it, the game freezes. The pokeballs are gone, and of course the pokemon is, too, after you restart the app. Well, and restarting (or starting in the first place) is just trying your luck. During the day it is "just" difficult to start, but after work or on weekends, the app does not even complete the loading screen. It usually hangs at the point where it connects to their server(s?) and thats it. As the server capacity problems have not been fixed after a week, I guess the server side simply does not scale (which perfectly matches the apps quality). That I get the game to start during my walk might be due to the fact that I walk while most of the teenagers are still in bed ;-)
Worse of all, people complained about the loss of bought items (e.g. you can buy those pokeballs if you are to impatient to "harvest" them), so I and maybe some other, more cautious people will wait for the software to getting into proper production status before spending a single cent on anything).
The version number of the app tells an developer that this software is basically not ready for production (0.29.2, a clear indicator for it being beta, if not alpha), and as unripe and buggy it is, it is an insult to the user. No reaction to the bug reports (they just generate an auto-answer that they won't reply to bug reports), and nearly 200k users giving that app only one star due to the bugs. And even those who give more stars more often than not complain that the app is buggy. I don't understand those idiots - If an app crashes regularly, why do they give five stars?
All in all, a nice new gaming idea, but with a total failure of an implementation. I have not heard of the development company (Niantic, Inc.) before, but from this experience, I would not let them develop even a "hello, world!" program for me.
I work at the real bottom of it. While other people think about "which OS (version) do I have to work on?", I sometimes don't even have a processor to work with.
I do FPGAs with VHDL, ARM CPUs in C and assembler, usually without any OS at all (think graphical UI on a machine with 2 kilobytes of RAM!), maybe with some library routines (not a full OS) for networking. Sometimes I have to work on the PC side of things, so I have a good part of my build chain (anything after the C and VHDL compilers to create update packages, etc), the communication libraries for my PC programmers, or simple tools in C and Perl, and sometimes BASH. And if it comes to worse, I do a bit of SQL, PHP, HTML, and even Lotus Script.
Switching between VHDL and C is so common, at the moment I have two VHDL and one C project open, and I work both - usually, while the VHDL synthesizes (10-15 minutes for one build), I write the test routines in C.
Does that mean they are exempt from the protection of it, too? I.e. are you allowed to robocall the government?
This is not meant as a joke, but as a serious question. But the answer I'm thinking of might lead to interesting results...
And in the next iteration, account names will be mandatory, together with the passwords for them (verified on the spot by your friendly customs people) and the PINs for your banking cards?
The PSA (Paranoid States of America) still shit their pants because of one terrorist incident a decade ago, while local yokels with guns (including the police) kill ten times that much people per year.
The HP books have a certain information density to them, so I dropped the speed of reading them down to about 100 to 120 pages per hour, And I have read them in English, which is not my native language. You could have quizzed me back then, and I would expect not to have failed (I actually won a radio quiz on the first HP volume which I had read weeks ago). Because I do read, not skim the text.
I've always been a fast reader. I actually started reading English books as an adolescent to reduce my reading speed (I'm not a native speaker of the English tongue). Even as a kid I did not need my members passes at the local libraries (they all knew me), and I was exempt from rule "children may only borrow two book at a time". In university, I attended a course on speed reading for fun, and my initial test was way faster than the tutors, and I still managed to gain an additional 10-20% boost by the course.
So I read about 100-200 pages per hour in English and 600-800 pages per hour in German. All while remembering a lot of details and enjoying fine points that even 'normal' readers might miss. I can sit down with the Lord of the Rings right after lunch and have read it by dinner, and still see the fine linguistic differences between the individual people in Middle Earth. And you can ask me about different scenes, and I can e.g. tell you that this scene is about _here_, on the lower left side.
This is also quite power consuming, i.e. my heart frequency and body temperature rises, and I actually absolutely cannot do this with a clogged-up nose, making having a cold many times as miserable...
I would not say that I miss out on things because of the speed reading - I do not skim, I _do_ read. And having information and storylines 'more present' due to the short temporal distances usually helps understanding a story better. I cannot imagine how people can cope with a story like Ted Williams Otherland when they have to spread reading it over weeks and months - all the issues of normal life in between reading a few pages here and there must be horrible (I spread reading the series over four days).
Over time, the detail knowledge of a story fades, of course, usually after having read some more books in the mean time. But something is always kept, and pops up when I re-read a book, or when I need the knowledge.
Have you ever tried to get a GPS signal inside a house (A real house, not cardboard or wood)? No chance.
We've got a time signal here called DCF77, which is quite strong and reliable (at least since tube TVs went the way of the dodo), and I even get a sufficient signal in my concrete basement.
Disclaimer: I'm a so-called LEGO Ambassador, i.e. I represent my LUG (Lego User Group) to LEGO, but I'm not a representative and/or work for LEGO itself.
LEGO is very interested in this 3D printing topic and had a workgroup on this on the Ambassador forum. I did not participate in this workgroup, but I can give some of the results. None of them come as a surprise, if one thinks this topic over, though, so I'm not telling any secrets.
- for standard bricks, it is too expensive, and except for a few classical basic bricks, there are patent and copyright issues.
- for bricks that do not exist from LEGO, this may work, but color, clutch power, surface structure, and durability are nearly impossible to match with current technologies
- best use for 3D printed stuff is to technically link LEGO parts to other things, e.g. a RasPi case that can be connected to a LEGO technik frame, where color and surface structures don't matter at all, and clutch power does not matter that much
- A lot of 3D stuff is accessories for Minifigs, like tools, weapons, hair pieces, etc.
Basically, while there are thousands of 3D data sets for LEGO parts available on the net, actually printing a box of bricks to build is far from being practical.
LEGO uses 3D printing in their design process, but only for prototyping. They are more likely to cut and glue existing parts for the prototyping, though, as this is still faster and better.
When I see those phone-junkies getting younger and younger, and kids having problems letting their phone go even for a short period of time, a blanket ban of Facebook & Co for minors in general would be an excellent idea.
Mr. James Clapper, best known for lying to the congress.
We have an application where we still need a real serial connection. USB serial adapters have too much brain for their own good, and don't cut it in realtime scenarios.
And from the embedded point of view, a UART can bed one with a handful of registers, maybe an interrupt, and a few lines of code, even in assembly. For talking USB, I need a whole protocol stack with hundreds of things I never ever need.
Back in ye olden times, fond memories of hours lost at a green serial terminal, TALKing to peope all over the world.
When things worked solely by agreement, i.e. if you registered your nick at some server (IIRC NICKSERV), it was yours, and nobody touched it.
When the first predator manages to groom a little girl via a hacked barbie, this kind of toys will be history.
What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches? - The Quarterly Review, March 1825.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895
640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981
I admit that humans are going to Mars to settle. But there, human space travel will end. - Louis Friedman (1941-), Engineer, in 2015
So if one is e.g. discussing how much money the government wasted, and wasted, and wasted again will lower the posters credit score? Primarily, the money was wasted on the banks that use the customer scoring in turn.
About 30 years ago, we already had pocket calculators in school. My elder sister, though, still had a book about calculating with a slide rule. I managed to get the book from her and a slide rule from someone else, and started exploring. Being the math geek in class, I could afford a bit of risk, so I brought the slide rule to a test where all my classmates used calculators (I still had mine in the bag in case the teacher would forbid using the slide rule). You should have seen the faces when I used that "plastic thingie" - and still was the first to finish, and later got the top score in class (again). Some even accused me of cheating, but the teacher was quite amused about it.
It was a fun experience, and I could even teach other people about it in university - we had a giant, working slide rule (a few meters long, probably an old demonstration device from a lecture room once) as a decoration on a wall.
Because not adhering to the red book standard can be interpreted as being "intentionally defective". Which was the legal way to go until SONY caved in and started to replace the CDs.
I'm one ofthe old dogs. I have to admit that App development and such is not my kind of things. But I do have experience. LOADS of it. When I see the fundamental mistakes by young "talented" programmers, it makes me cringe.
Just a few days ago, there was a kickoff meeting for a new project. This project needs multi-user support on the long run - everyone in the team admits that. And access control, with all its implications like "how to I check a password", "how do I store a password", "which kind of permission do I need to call this function". Which they never ever did before. None of them had ever heard of books like "Applied Cryprography". There is a copy here, on my shelf. Actually, it is my second book, the first was worn down due to heavy use. All they cared for was "Licence Management", but I'm not sure if they understand how this works properly. I offered them to ride piggyback on the existing licence management scheme I've implemented in my part of the system, but this was probably too unsexy, because it cannot add licences on the fly over the web, at least not "just so".
My experience tells me (and anyone who has been around for long enough) that any software that will need this kind of multiuser support needs to have this built-in from the very beginning. The very concepts of the software must be aware of the possibility that e.g. a call might fail for lack of permissions. Communication protocols must be designed in a way that they guarantee to a sufficient degree that one side has proper identification presented to the other side to be permitted to do this, and don't that. This is nothing that can be added lateron without SERIOUS headaches, problems, and, worst of all, risks. Windows9x was the living prrof of such a mistake.
Reply from the "young talent": Implementing multi-user is too time consuming at the moment, we will add it later. *FACEDESK*
Math, and its application, never was a strength of the economists. Nor was or is logical reasoning or application of scientific methods.
Ages ago, I made a fake economics whitepaper. It looked like the stuff I've seen in their libraries, the text was equally braindead, and it contained a lot of made-up formulas. The formulas were completely irrelevant (as was the text), but if anyone had followed the pattern to read the "input data" in the text before and actually pass it through the shown calculations, he would have noticed a) that the actual result did not match whatever was written in the text, and b) that all formulas resulted in an 8-digit number (with the decimal point in varying places) like 1991.0401 or 199104.01 (I'm no longer sure aboute the "1991" part, it could have been "1992" or "1993", don't care).
Of course this ended up in their library, along with a matching card in the index (they still had a paper-based index back then).
I actually got asked by someone if he could base his doctoral thesis on my "phenomenal" findings. I told him to do the math, and contact me again if he still considered this a good idea.
I built a C64 expansion card containing 256KB of EPROM and 256KB or RAM that I could use via bank switching. As I had no fancy layout tool back then, I had to draw the layout in a paint program (taking into account that the nine needle dot matrix printer had a 216x256 raster!), matching both sides manually, print it, find a photocopier that actually reduced the size by 50% without bending it totally out of shape (I learned the hard way that photocopiers back then had the habit of being a bit fish.eyed when it comes to resizing), make the PCB, and drill a gazillion holes with a hand-kranked drill. Most vias were placed wherver there were wired elements or sockets, but quite a few vias had to be made by soldering a bit of wire on both sides. A horrible hack job in retrospective, but it worked flawlessly from the beginning!
Yes, I am aware that pigeons are birds and therefor a different domain as mammals, and that there might be some differences in the biochemistry here, but I hope they work something out to get those flying rats under control.
The VW (and probably others, I don't believe that only VW cheated - What miracle did they all work in unison to be 30x better with emissions than VW?) problem is the engine, not the general "Car Intelligence". I believe that the VW scandal will lead to more electric cars in the future (not electic replacing diesel, but a shift where gasoline enters the diesel domain, while at the other end electric engines cut their margin of the gasoline market).
What will happen in the future, though, is that the certification authorities will want to see, examine and understand the source code. Which will not only prolong the certification, but also make it way more expensive. It will also force the car manufacturers to cleanly separate the engine control domain from the other control domains in the car, so they can limit the skope of openness to this one domain only.
Whether an Apple gaming console is any good or not is totally besides the point. If Apple builds and sells something, there are more than enought brainwashed idiots (AKA Apple disciples) standing in line on release date to buy it.
Look at the iWatch - A nice attempt to look cool, but everyone ignored the fact that current technology (even Apples) cannot deliver what a useable smartwatch would need. Still, they sold quite a lot of them, until the market reality cought up and finally found that the concept is bonkers from the very beginning.
So if Apple builds a gaming console, of course hoards of idiots will queue on release night just because its Apple, not because its a useable product. As with the iWatch, they will be disappointed shortly after, as CandyCrush on a TV will not be the thing that would drive a console market. The top games and game development companies are already tied to real consoles with an existing market and infrastructure, so Apple would have to start from scratch in a market that will fight any newcomer tooth and nail.
TL;DR: Apple does not live of phones or consoles, but on idiots with too much money. Quality or common sense have long ceased to be arguments here.