Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they…
Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive…
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary…
My favorite documentary I have not seen (yet), I Dream of Wires from 2013, about modular synthesizers. I know in some trailer there was a maker of modules saying something to the effect that if only people actually…
I don't think I ever had a A4 printer that could not also print Letter. It is almost certainly the exact same models that they also sell in the US, but with just some bit flipped in the firmware to change the default…
Not sure what they are referring to, but it may be that you can declare things as having one of several types (e.g. int|string|void) or even that something can be any type at all (i.e. turn off static type-checking for…
From what I remember of working with Pike, the best part was probably the included image module. Maybe I will install Pike again just to see if I still like it. https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/chapter_13.html
Does turning off data (mobile+wifi) when not actually using any app help at all (on Android)? Will apps still be able to phone home in the background? Or will they just fill up a huge cache with data and bulk-transfer…
Not just a modern application with a retro gaming aesthetic, but this year I got heavily into using (ex-Autodesk, now open source) Animator as my programmer art application of choice. Actual 16-bit software.…
Old DOS games are often sold (e.g. on GOG or Steam) with an installer and a full copy of DOSBox, so you get an entire operating system plus hardware emulator to run the game. Looks like this adds less than 10 MB to each…
I set up two old computers to play some Minecraft with my youngest kid. Unfortunately it turns out recent versions are much slower than old ones. I have not bothered to bisect it to figure out exactly what version(s)…
Clean hierarchy? How do I even guess if some config-file is hidden in ~/.config/ or ~/.local/share? I never figured that out. Looking at the contents of those directories here I can't guess better than a coin-toss. Why…
I think of MS-DOS mostly as the ultimate fantasy console. It is sad that the only way to write something once and not have to maintain it to keep up with breaking dependencies all the time is to target a dead platform.…
It is specifically illegal to make a copy of something that has been illegally published, not illegal to make copies for personal use in general. Not that I am a lawyer.
Went the opposite direction here. Copying things for personal use was always legal in Sweden, with some exceptions (notably software, since 1986). That law was amended in 2005 (because of The Pirate Bay, presumably) to…
I have played around a lot with GW-BASIC (and pcbasic (pip install pcbasic)) lately and this strikes me as something that could be made to work very well with old BASIC variants using line-numbers, since when the…
I have not used Lynx interactively in ages, but when I want to save some pages of text from somewhere (typically an old web forum thread or blog) I often call lynx -dump (followed by gzip) from a script. It is an easy…
Later (~1990's) gamebook series like Fable Lands or Critical IF (AKA Virtual Reality) improved on the mechanics so much that I find it difficult to go back to earlier types of books like FF or Lone Wolf except for…
Online versions of Lone Wolf books (1999, with author's permission): https://projectaon.org/en/Main/Home
That seems to be a problem that is getting worse with time though, with increasingly frequent "major" releases and fewer that consider backwards compatibility much at all. Also it used to be much more common to have…
With DOSBox-X, and probably some other DOS emulators as well, you can set up any SVGA BIOS graphics modes you want to (up to at least 32-bit color with 16-bit integers for screen width and height), so a DOS application…
Guess now is a good time to hoard some recent dumps. What would be some good local tools to browse those? https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
But work from home has revealed how wrong that was and returning to office is a waste of limited free time that we are not compensated for.
Functions are not always pure, no. Clojure is not so strict about I/O, meaning that function could for instance call out to make a database request. But I think that is unrelated to immutability or ownership of data?…
A good alternative for game engines where Lua has literally already been embedded is to use Fennel, a LISP that borrows some Clojure-like syntax and that compiles to Lua-code. In some cases it should be possible, like…
Do you really need this to explain WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? They, like many others, built their castles on Microsoft's land. Isn't it that easy? What could they have done realistically once Microsoft decided they…
Some future manager will look at a graph and think monetization can be improved X% while only losing an estimated Y% of users. It is guaranteed to happen. Question is only if most in the current generation will outlive…
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary…
My favorite documentary I have not seen (yet), I Dream of Wires from 2013, about modular synthesizers. I know in some trailer there was a maker of modules saying something to the effect that if only people actually…
I don't think I ever had a A4 printer that could not also print Letter. It is almost certainly the exact same models that they also sell in the US, but with just some bit flipped in the firmware to change the default…
Not sure what they are referring to, but it may be that you can declare things as having one of several types (e.g. int|string|void) or even that something can be any type at all (i.e. turn off static type-checking for…
From what I remember of working with Pike, the best part was probably the included image module. Maybe I will install Pike again just to see if I still like it. https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/chapter_13.html
Does turning off data (mobile+wifi) when not actually using any app help at all (on Android)? Will apps still be able to phone home in the background? Or will they just fill up a huge cache with data and bulk-transfer…
Not just a modern application with a retro gaming aesthetic, but this year I got heavily into using (ex-Autodesk, now open source) Animator as my programmer art application of choice. Actual 16-bit software.…
Old DOS games are often sold (e.g. on GOG or Steam) with an installer and a full copy of DOSBox, so you get an entire operating system plus hardware emulator to run the game. Looks like this adds less than 10 MB to each…
I set up two old computers to play some Minecraft with my youngest kid. Unfortunately it turns out recent versions are much slower than old ones. I have not bothered to bisect it to figure out exactly what version(s)…
Clean hierarchy? How do I even guess if some config-file is hidden in ~/.config/ or ~/.local/share? I never figured that out. Looking at the contents of those directories here I can't guess better than a coin-toss. Why…
I think of MS-DOS mostly as the ultimate fantasy console. It is sad that the only way to write something once and not have to maintain it to keep up with breaking dependencies all the time is to target a dead platform.…
It is specifically illegal to make a copy of something that has been illegally published, not illegal to make copies for personal use in general. Not that I am a lawyer.
Went the opposite direction here. Copying things for personal use was always legal in Sweden, with some exceptions (notably software, since 1986). That law was amended in 2005 (because of The Pirate Bay, presumably) to…
I have played around a lot with GW-BASIC (and pcbasic (pip install pcbasic)) lately and this strikes me as something that could be made to work very well with old BASIC variants using line-numbers, since when the…
I have not used Lynx interactively in ages, but when I want to save some pages of text from somewhere (typically an old web forum thread or blog) I often call lynx -dump (followed by gzip) from a script. It is an easy…
Later (~1990's) gamebook series like Fable Lands or Critical IF (AKA Virtual Reality) improved on the mechanics so much that I find it difficult to go back to earlier types of books like FF or Lone Wolf except for…
Online versions of Lone Wolf books (1999, with author's permission): https://projectaon.org/en/Main/Home
That seems to be a problem that is getting worse with time though, with increasingly frequent "major" releases and fewer that consider backwards compatibility much at all. Also it used to be much more common to have…
With DOSBox-X, and probably some other DOS emulators as well, you can set up any SVGA BIOS graphics modes you want to (up to at least 32-bit color with 16-bit integers for screen width and height), so a DOS application…
Guess now is a good time to hoard some recent dumps. What would be some good local tools to browse those? https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
But work from home has revealed how wrong that was and returning to office is a waste of limited free time that we are not compensated for.
Functions are not always pure, no. Clojure is not so strict about I/O, meaning that function could for instance call out to make a database request. But I think that is unrelated to immutability or ownership of data?…
A good alternative for game engines where Lua has literally already been embedded is to use Fennel, a LISP that borrows some Clojure-like syntax and that compiles to Lua-code. In some cases it should be possible, like…