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User: I8TheWorm

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  1. Re:Tickled to see this on Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 · · Score: 1

    How did that compare to your work on the 68000 when you ported to the Atari ST? I only ask because I bypassed the 68000, and some previous commenters mention it's ease of use, especially compared to the x80 and x86. My only assembler work was on the Z80.

  2. Re:C'mon. It's a cool page on Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 · · Score: 1

    A lot of that has to do with faulty manufacturer drivers, the cause of a great many BSODs (I'm sure most /.ers have seen at least the comments from the NT4.0 code). MS completely revamped their drivers and signing for Vista/Win7, vastly improving the stability of their OSs.

    And to be fair, I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, my favorite OS right now is Ubuntu. "It just w..." oh wait, I think that comment is trademarked now.

  3. Re:Painful on Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 · · Score: 1

    That TS-100 was my first computer, and looking back, had it not been for the simplicity of programming the Z80 relative to both the 6502 and the 8080, I probably wouldn't be a programmer today (I was 14 at the time).

  4. horrible title on Mac App Store Apps Already Hacked · · Score: 3, Informative

    Did the poster read the article? Angry Birds can be copied freely by switching out a file used for Twitter because Angry Birds didn't use Apple's recommended security.

    I love to take jabs at Apple and the Cult of Steve, but this is a completely inappropriately titled article.

  5. Re:No on Will Touch Screens Kill the Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the link, I missed it somehow. I'm going to try it out, perhaps this weekend.

    At first glance it looks like it might be a nice replacement for Swype, even though there's certainly a learning curve. Unfortunately, it still doesn't address the keyboard taking up screen real esate, which of course only a slider or foldout solves.

    Maybe device manufacturers should consider a Nintendo DS kind of layout with the touch keyboard, or Swype, or 8Pen on the bottom screen... or any number of other possibilities including controls for media player, popups like email composition with the list remaining on the other screen, etc...

  6. Re:Copyright Rocks on Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Again, all very insightful thoughts (which is why I friended you).

    I'm going to touch on the second to last paragraph though. I don't believe the economy as a whole benefits from taking money from productive people to finance deadbeats so they too can spend money. If a rich person buys a yacht, how many jobs do you think that funds? If a rich person invests their money in stocks, bonds, or saves in a bank, how many jobs do you think that funds? People with more disposable income are much more likely to buy higher end items they may or may not need, and the US still manufactures many of those goods. Again, more jobs.

    However, when you take more and more of that money for funding deadbeats, those items are not purchased as often. What you've done in that case is taken away money working for the economy to fund the purchase of extra fries with the combo. You've also helped perpetuate a lifestyle that depends on the transfer of those funds to continue buying extra fries.

    On crime rates, I wholly agree, as with people with nothing to lose. I don't think giving them something for nothing helps get them out of the situation they're in, whether self perpetuated or not. I do believe welfare is a good system, as people fall on hard times and need a boost once in a while. I feel the same way about unemployment insurance. I DON'T feel we're using those funds well for generational welfare families or baby factories though.

  7. Re:1 day turn-around on PHP Floating Point Bug Crashes Servers · · Score: 1

    A couple of the tenets of pragmatic programming are making code reusable, and making it understandable. One of my issues with PHP is the naming conventions used in the myriad functions developed for it. Some are camel, some use underscores, some just use bunched up words, all for function names and for parameters.

    That lack of standardization makes using PHP confusing for someone not sitting with a book next to them.

    They do have some merits though. PHP is easy to get into for novice programmers, it's free for use, and because of that most inexpensive hosting plans include PHP. That's why I think it's in such wide use.

    You rarely if at all find it in the enterprise. I think that's because it's difficult to maintain (I'm not going to spark a performance argument here... Smalltalk has been shown to be slower in instances and I've seen ST in the enterprise).

    I likely would have praised them at the onset of my career in 1992, or when I started writing code in 1984. However, at this point I do scorn them when I know they could do better for maintainability.

  8. Re:No on Will Touch Screens Kill the Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    Right, but the title suggests physical keyboards going away, which is what I meant in my post.

  9. Re:AppBrain on Amazon To Launch 'Amazon Appstore For Android' · · Score: 1

    Ahhh good to know. You probably already realize I meant the ability to push the update.

  10. Re:Why can't we have both? on Will Touch Screens Kill the Keyboard? · · Score: 3, Funny

    I thought it was because Steve Jobs told people that's what they wanted.

  11. Re:No on Will Touch Screens Kill the Keyboard? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And....

    You simply can't type on a touchscreen without looking, at least not for any usable amount of time. I love my Galaxy-S with the Swype keyboard, but even that is no replacement for a physical one.

  12. Re:Copyright Rocks on Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Fair enough, but I've seen my fair share of people who had every excuse in the world to fail (including my former neighbor who lived with his alcoholic grandfather after his drug addicted mother commited suicide). I think there's more to poor choice than lots of people consider.

    I agree with you again on economy as a whole. I think we're just going to disagree on best methods to accomplish that. Stable economy, check. Healthy citizens, check. Educated citizens, check.

    Growing food, while important, does not generate a strong economy, it generates a sustainable one. Services don't always require infrastructures in countries they're exported to (medical, legal, consulting, etc...) but yes, you're spot on in that it's the first to get cut when budgets are tight.

  13. Re:1 day turn-around on PHP Floating Point Bug Crashes Servers · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's because they're not spending their time improving thread-safe modules, ternary operators, flip flopping again on defaulting magic_quotes, or understanding pragmatism :)

  14. Re:Better use? on Crowdfund a Moon Monolith Mission? · · Score: 1

    Toss in most politicians and I'll have paypal at the ready.

  15. Re:Copyright Rocks on Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Does that mean you're suggesting the rest of us should have to pay for peoples' poor choices in life?

  16. Re:Fragmentation on Amazon To Launch 'Amazon Appstore For Android' · · Score: 1

    I'm a mobile developer, and none of my colleagues or connections complain about Android fragmentation. With any development, you draw a line in the sand, target an OS version, and go.

    Device manufacturers are creating choice, but I see no issues with fragmentation. The OS and APIs handle input from various keyboards, accelerometers, cameras (front and back). And there are tons of frameworks to help you along in the event you're unable to create screen objects with width by % rather than px.

  17. Re:AppBrain on Amazon To Launch 'Amazon Appstore For Android' · · Score: 2

    Appbrain's ability to push to the device was broken by the latest Market release.

    Sucks.

  18. Re:Tabula Rasa on Why BioWare's Star Wars MMO May Already Be Too Late · · Score: 1

    I think I finally agree with you again :)

  19. Re:Copyright Rocks on Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years · · Score: 1

    I agree with you on revenue, but not really on how to get there. Since I give up 36% of my income to the gubmint, that's 36% of my income I cannot spend. And if you think the gubmint efficiently doles that $$ out to the well deserving, think again. By the time it trickles down to welfare recipients, over 50% of the $$ is gone thanks to bureaucracy.

    If an employer doesn't pay a fair wage, their competitor, wanting good works, will. It's only when monopolies are allowed (or illegal labor) that companies can force wages down to unbearable levels. Take a look at the Google vs. Facebook programmer situation. Google is throwing more $$ at people to stay because Facebook looks sexier to work for.

  20. Re:How is this newsworthy? It's just common sense. on Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb · · Score: 1

    That's fantastic when you 1) set up redundant switches/routers, and 2) hadn't decided to remove support at your remote locations and try to handle it all from one distant office.

  21. Re:How is this newsworthy? It's just common sense. on Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb · · Score: 1

    Want a punchline? That company recently bought another in a different town. The head of the NSS group imaged their machines over the network during peak hours through that DLink crap. When the new images didn't work, they were unable to revert them to their old images because, you guessed it, the packetstorm created during the imaging caused the files to become corrupt.

    The accounting group at the new company was down for a week.

    TO be fair, I use a DLink router at home, and it's been fine. Except for the limit on MAC addresses it will store for network filtering... dadgummit.

  22. Re:Tabula Rasa on Why BioWare's Star Wars MMO May Already Be Too Late · · Score: 1

    Well, the way swgemu did it was to not at all alter the client code. Instead, all they did was write server code to support the client. At some point along the way they got SOE and/or LA's blessing to continue as long as they didn't do anything that would compete with the modern version of the game.

    I disagree with the reasoning, although revenue certainly wasn't what they thought it would be. Both Garriotts parted with NCSoft on not-so-good terms, and I think a large reason for the shut-down in such rapid fashion was political.

    City of Heroes revenue has been dwindling for years, and I think the last I saw of an estimated user base was around 30k. TR had an estimated 50k when it was shut down.

  23. Re:Copyright Rocks on Pirate Party Founder Steps Down After 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Meh, I'm a libertarian... I don't think the government should do either. Technically, neither does our constitution.

  24. Re:How is this newsworthy? It's just common sense. on Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb · · Score: 2

    Careful what you wish for... the CIO at the Fortune 100 company I just left still thinks DLink routers without redundancy are the way to go. He still approves purchases for replacements and new ones.

    You could be having fun with that.

  25. Re:Tabula Rasa on Why BioWare's Star Wars MMO May Already Be Too Late · · Score: 1

    True that, but I was more interested from day 1 in PVP (which was pretty unrefined). However, having to buy the ammo for the turrets meant being broke at lvl 50.

    Those were all very tweakable problems though, and had TR been given time to mature, I'm sure we'd be talking ingame about how out of balance the classes were back in the day.

    I spent a little bit of time helping out on the swgemu project... and have wondered if there was any value in trying to do the same for TR. Unfortunately, there wouldn't likely be enough client code to implement multiple races, and definitely not vehicles as was rumored.