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God do I hate that stuff. Had an infection that took me several tries of System Restore to finally get rid of it. Then there was the time I just reinstalled my system.
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The Internet, it seems, has found its version of vinyl chic. Just as the LP has enjoyed a second spin among retro-minded music fans, animated GIFs — the choppy, crude snippets of video loops that hearken back to dial-up modems — are enjoying an unlikely vogue as the digital accessory of the moment. Making a comeback? More like never left. Animate all the things!
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Apparently pixel art is cool once again, and if you are reading this blog, chances are, you like pixel art. As my first actual article on the site, I thought I’d make a little tutorial on how to pixel your own 16*16 sprite, that you can use as a favicon for your website or game. There are many ways to go about pushing pixels, and this is just one of them. Sadly, this tutorial will not teach you how to draw or come up with nice ideas, sorry. Also I will not go into program-specific details, you need to have some basic familiarity with the software you want to use. Because the world needs more icon-sized 8-bit art.
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We live in a wonderful time when programmers can be so naive about the workings of Big Business. I’m not being the least bit snarky there, either. I see so many young developers working in startups and progressive agencies, blissfully unaware of just how poisonous corporate culture can be sometimes. But they do tend to live in a tech-savvy bubble, and sometimes it’s helpful to see how “real people” use the tools our industry gives them. I once worked for a company run off a couple Excel spreadsheets, just like JP Morgan.... Don’t hate the spreadsheet, hate the game.
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Over the years I’ve owned quite a few computers. An endless series of PC compatibles that mostly differed from each other in CPU speed or memory capacity. But before the PC era computers were a bit different in that they differed vastly from each other. The advent of the PC homogenized personal computing to a large extent, this is now due to the proliferation of mobile platforms and various tinkerer devices (Raspi, Arduino, etc) changing again but for the longest time it seemed as though x86 was what computing was all about. What computers helped shape the course your life?
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The course my life what?
DEC: PDP, VAX
WOPR, Deep Thought, ...
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Computers I have gladly seen the back of...
zx81
atari portfolio
Acorn RiscPC (graphics mode options were worse than previous A3000)
HP Pavilion (Turion 64) - a blue screen nightmare
The ones that got away..
Commodore Amiga (a major regret)
Atari Falcon (costly)
Owned (but sold)
Atari 800 (30yrs & faultless operation)
Panasonic CF150 Portable (Green LCD)
Apple Performa 6200
HP 620LX (WinCE 2.11 - upgrade)
rev.A iMac (bondi blue)
+lots of PCs that I've built myself. (still do)
Still have
PDP11-23 (processor section only - no disk drives)
Atari ST/STe x 3 or 4 (as spares)
Apple G3 (last beige model) x2
Apple Quadra 610
Apple LC / Performa 450 (basically the same)
Apple Newton MP130 (spares with intention to repair someday)
Apple Newton MP2000 (MP2100 upgrade) - still in use
Atari XL (lots of spares) 600xl, still in use
Atari XE-GS/GM (x2 knackered spares)
HP Jornada 720 (x3 2 for spares)
Toshiba JournE Touch (Windows CE 6)
Raspberry Pi rev.B
3 or 4 more working PCs (XP64 x2, ubuntu studio 12.04) + lots of spare parts.
Jeezuz!! and I thought the pile was going down.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
modified 23-Feb-13 20:24pm.
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Quote: Apple Newton MP2000 (MP2100 upgrade) - still in use Yes! I remember being so impressed with these devices when they were new.
My first employer had some fantastic early '90s SGI Iris and Indigo boxen that I loved playing with. Should have grabbed one when the company went under...
I'm still sort of half-seriously looking for a NeXT cube and an original Be Box. I built up a Tyan Tiger-based machine (dual Athlon XP) to run BeOS when they ported it to x86. Neat toy, but ultimately it went nowhere and the machine ended up running Win2k (quite well I might add). Great machine until the voltage controllers died and the smoke went out of it...
I get nostalgic for those old systems sometimes - then I'm reminded that a modern Mac does most of what they could, faster, with far better app and peripheral support. If I want to relive the old days I can just fire up a Terminal session.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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The NeXT boxes are fetching silly money on eBay these days, with or without packaging.
Funnily enough I also built a Tyan Tiger 230 system (2001/2 I think - fog rolls in..) That lasted about 3 years (Win2k) until the Athlon64 came out. Yay! I've been using those machines ever since. (I've replaced everything , incrementally)
I was lusting after those SGI boxes around the time that Nintendo 64 was released. Didn't they do development of N64 on SGI? or they provided the GPU for it. A real shame they went under.
The hand-writing recognition on the MP2000/2100 was way better than previous models, thanks to the StrongArm running at 160MHz or whatever it was. I left it with the main battery out for over 3 months and it had retained all the information when I went back to it. Amazing.
I really miss the simplicity of older systems, as they don't put barriers to the hardware.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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Who says it's love? It's more like taxes.
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When we think of the comma character we often think of it as a separator. It separates values in an CSV file, it separates items in lists, it may separate index values in multidimensional arrays (in other languages) and more. But in C++ an obscure way of using them was as an operator. The reason it never made it big as an operator and into the typical programming psyche is that largely it is seen as useless or some kind of "syntactic sugar". So in this article we try to show how it works, why it has a stigma and some possible uses for it that may prove useful at some point in your career going forward. Eats(), Shoots() and Leaves();
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Why does he keep saying C++, it's a C thing. And C# doesn't have it.
I think the only times I've use the comma operator is in for loops:
for ( i = 3 , j = 5 ; ... ; ... ) ...
for ( ... ; i = GetSomething() , j < k ; ... ) ...
for ( ... ; ... ; i++ , j++ ) ...
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That's not what they are getting at. In C++ it's an operator proper and can be overloaded.
Steve
modified 14-Feb-13 7:34am.
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In C++, ypu* can overload it, allowing e.g.
EnableDlgItems(hwnd, false), IDC_FOO, IDC_BAR, IDC_BAZ;
*) also, you.
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Kind of misses the best bits sadly. The comma operator can be used to explicitly control order of operation, i.e. prevent the compiler from reordering things that aren't directly related but have a hidden ordering dependency. Using the comma operator this way is the solution to Alexander Andrescu's pure C++ portable mutex implementation problem. I must write this up with a test case at some point, busy, busy, busy
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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In today’s web applications, dialog boxes are about as common place as they are in desktop applications. It’s pretty easy to show or hide an element that is overlayed on the page using a little JavaScript and CSS but few take into account how this affects accessibility. In most cases, it’s an accessibility disaster. The input focus isn’t handled correctly and screen readers aren’t able to tell that something is changed. In reality, it’s not all that difficult to make a dialog that’s fully accessible, you just need to understand the importance of a few lines of code. An ARIA in the key of accessibility.
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The concept of a ‘web page’ is quickly becoming meaningless. I believe there’s a new way to look at the Web and the browser, and synthesizing it with old technologies could result in a novel technique for Web development and content editing. The browser as a VM + live-editing and persistence.
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The Data Science Toolkit is a collection of the best open data sets and open-source tools for data science, wrapped in an easy-to-use REST/JSON API with command line, Python and Javascript interfaces. Available as a self-contained Vagrant VM or EC2 AMI that you can deploy yourself. The Data Science Toolkit is essentially a specialized Linux distribution, with a lot of useful data software pre-installed and exposing a simple interface. Big data? There's an app (bundle) for that.
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Video games appeal to our desire to explore and interact with our environment, and adding real-world phenomena-such as fluid motion-allows game developers to create immersive and fun virtual worlds. Recently, physical simulations have become more realistic, but the simulations have largely been limited to rigid bodies. Pervasive simulations of continuous media like cloth and fluids remain uncommon, largely because fluid dynamics entail conceptual and computational challenges that make simulating fluids difficult. This article begins a series that explains fluid dynamics and its simulation techniques. The series culminates in an example of a fluid simulation algorithm suitable for use in a video game. Grab a drink and start reading this 15-part series on simulated fluid dynamics.
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I expect by now you’ve heard that Opera (my employer for the last four and half years) has announced that its browsers will, in future, use the WebKit rendering engine. I wrote the announcement, and what follows here is my personal take on it. It’s on my personal blog precisely because it does not reflect the opinion of my employer, wife, kids or hamster. Opera’s Presto engine was a means to an end; a means for a small, European browser company to challenge the dominance of companies who, at that time, hoped to “win” the web through embracing, extending and extinguishing web standards. Presto showed that it was possible to make a better browser while supporting standards. Other vendors have followed this path; the world has changed... Opera drops Presto and embraces WebKit. Bruce explains why.
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xBox’s primary critical problem is the lack of a functional and growing platform ecosystem for small developers to sell digitally-/network-distributed (non-disc) content through to the installed base of xBox customers, period. Why can’t I write a game for xBox tomorrow using $100 worth of tools and my existing Windows laptop and test it on my home xBox or at my friends’ houses? Why can’t I then distribute it digitally in a decent online store, give up a 30% cut and strike it rich if it’s a great game, like I can for Android, for iPhone, or for iPad? Oh, wait, I can… sort of. Must-read insights from a founder of the original xBox project.
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That rant is so full of win! Please find one for the PS3; it is an order of magnitude more crappy than the XBox 360. Like the time I bought a few games, then started downloading one, then clicked "download all", which repeated the download of the game I had previously already started downloading. I had to fiddle with it for like half an hour before I got the game working.
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In a breakthrough experiment, the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT discovered that cross-training, which is swapping jobs with someone else on your team to help everyone understand the work better, works even when your coworker doesn't have a mind. In short, when humans and robots model doing each others' job they end up working together more smoothly. It's in your nature to train the machines that will replace yourselves.
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