HN user

MalphasWats

66 karma

Father, Husband, Teacher, Developer, Geek.

http://www.subdimension.co.uk

Posts2
Comments27
View on HN

I feel like the CX16 lost its way about a week after the project started and it suddenly became an expensive FPGA-based blob. But at the same time, I'm not sure what other option there is for a project like that.

I always got the impression that David sort of got railroaded by the other members of the team that wanted to keep adding features and MOAR POWAH, and didn't have a huge amount of choice because those features quickly scoped out of his own areas of knowledge.

It's incredible how influential Ben Eater's breadboard computer series has been in hobby electronics. I've been similarly inspired to try to design my own "retro" CPU.

I desperately want something as easy to plug into things as the 6502, but with jussst a little more capability - few more registers, hardware division, that sort of thing. It's a really daunting task.

I always end up coming back to just use an MCU and be done with it, and then I hit the How To Generate Graphics problem.

This looks interesting, thanks.

At the moment I don't want to use it as a single display, rather display 9 different things (and various permutations thereof).

I plan to hack something together, but I'm struggling to envision how it should all look, so this is a good start.

Ironically, we're all reading this on the web, where browsers merrily remove superfluous white space. If every browser can agree on that, given how much they all disagree on, I'll take that as a pretty good endorsement for single-spacing.

I did this once. I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop, resizing the disk partition as I went. When I switched back to Windows, I realised I had left it hibernated and the partition resize upset it very much.

A day or so later, I tried to install some sound drivers in Ubuntu and somehow managed to uninstall xwindows entirely (I learnt to read and think before typing stuff in off a web site :)

A day later I rebuilt from the windows install disk and left things alone. I keep Linux on my servers, it's much happier there!

I think that this comes down not so much to the arrogance of "Our idea is so good, we must stop people copying it!", but more the ignorance of "I read a lot about NDAs, they seem like something that might make people take us more seriously as businesspeople".

it's a fair point, however, the way I see it, they had 2 choices: Release at iOS 6, release at iOS 7. We don't know when they actually started working on the new maps app. Choosing to delay for another whole year would have been a bigger mistake in my opinion. Apple Maps has successfully got me everywhere I've asked it.

There's a fairly long grace period after initial expiration when a domain is expired but can't be re-registered. It allows for the original owner to get it back (for a larger fee) before it's sniped by the next person.

My opinion would be that if you're getting a lot of these kinds of issues, the signup page could well be the culprit.

A much better solution is to have 2 boxes "Email address", "password" and a button to make it Go.

If you need "inside leg measurement", "first pet's tail fur colour", "crazy aunt petunia's whisker count at last birthday", you can ask for that as part of the natural flow of using your service later.

Get people in and using it, make it really clear before they click the signup button what the primary benefit of your service is.

Years ago I went on a course that covered all kinds of things related to dealing with people and this issue was one of them.

The awkwardness is easily removed simply by greeting someone by their name and repeating yours without giving them a chance to 'not remember'.

"Greg! Hi! Mike. How's Sarah? Did you find your dog in the end?"

I'm genuinely curious, as I've never actually used it[1], but if someone waved a magic wand, and ALL illegal music, movies and books vanished from bittorrent networks, what would be left?

[1]blizzard uses it for WoW updates, but I don't think that really counts.

You are absolutely right! I own the copyright to almost every single file stored in my dropbox account, because I created them. Those that I didn't are happily stored but not distributed, entirely within the licences granted by the owners of the material.

I was going to say "that's pretty much how Facebook started out, as a website to rate female college students". Then I realised I got that from The Social Network, which is a film, and probably not entirely accurate.

Certainly believable though.

I hated OneNote when I first saw it, then I started to use it and found that it had a lot of potential, particularly on a tablet pc (in 2005!).

I suffered with corruptions of the notes files, which were also VERY large, and then I changed to a standard laptop and found that it lost all of its charm without a pen.

I'd love to see what happens with it on the new Win8 tablets; hopefully it will get some metro/arm love.

All my notes live in dropbox-synced plain text files now.