altitudinous

Chickens have come home to roost. Someone had to pay for the servers and the debt, and its us!!

Arrogant. End users decide by deciding what they want to use. Thats all there is to it.

Interesting to see this stuff. I really enjoyed cracking this back in the day, just for friends, but took a different approach of using sector editors to read the code on the disk to find where the checks wer done to see if the protections were present and replacing it with NOPs ($EA), or changing BNEs to BEQs. What was more interesting was how the code that did the check was also moved about the disk, I remember seeing for a particular piece of code it did a B-E (Block Execute) on Track 5 Sector 5. I could plainly see the protection check on that spot on the disk. My young self was very excited about working it out. The puzzle of copy protection was more fun than playing the actual games. Very frequently the directory tracks (18?? I think) were overwritten but it was obvious looking over the disk to see the headers for various programs and the load start address so it was easy to rebuild. Golden times. I've coded since then, and only recently have stopped as AI has finally got better than me!!

Indeed context awareness is the big difference here, GPT5 is a vast improvement. It doesn't lose track (as easily)

A discussion of the victim is not relevant. A discussion of the root cause is.

NO. I work on very public software, I receive pretty terrible criticism in reviews and email. Generally a vocal minority of people are unkind scammers and want it all for free and let me know. Blaming the recipient of the emails (victim blaming) or saying the individual may be suffering from wider issues is not on. It is irrelevant, it is their private life. At issue are the scum who scam.

I agree (and its not often I agree with folk on Hacker News), Apple provide a far superior password service inside a far inferior UI. The handling of authentication codes is particularly great in the Apple ecosystem, but very poorly promoted.

For a company that markets itself as secure these are retrograde steps.

Blah Blah Blah. I use ChatGPT for this every day to write code to save my own efforts and it is doing just fine thanks. I also use it for creative content in my apps, although I edit this work to get the tone in its writing correct. It is excellent for this.

Terrible idea, the reason why Apple is so popular is that the apps are extremely diverse. Being suggested here is an app store with apps curated by computer nerds who think they are diverse but are probably left biased. Terrible. If you want curation, go on to the Apple app store Today, Games and Apps tab pages. For everyone else there is the Search tab. A good balance.

A book called "Astronomical Algorithms" was written back in the 80's or 90's. It was very exciting and inspirational for me that the sun and moon and the position of planets - nature itself - could be predicted by code. It still is an inspiration for me today.

Outstanding blogs, really enjoyed reading them. Someone talented actually performing a hack, rare these days.

This comes up often in various postings and forums, and I enjoy it every time I read it. I like the perspective.

It is important here that he wrote LETTERS. Not emails. LETTERS.

Folks are firing off emails all the time. Taking time to write a letter is more likely to get a response, from just about anyone.

Whatever laptop you already own.

Looks amazing, but the youtube video on the site is so frustrating, endless demos and credits, not much gameplay - takes nearly 3 minutes of viewing to get to anything Prince of Persia related. Not the way to sell a game, but it does look great.

This. Especially on the app store. I have several successful side projects myself and am semi retired.

But it is a waste of time trying to tell people that discoverability is the key to success. Everyone who owns an iPhone thinks they are an app expert and the first thing they do with a new idea is to come up with an unsearchable, undiscoverable name.

A lot of vocal small developers are unimpressed. A vocal minority is not a majority - most just don't care knowing what the outcome was going to be already - lawyers making a lot of money, and marketing teams posturing. Move on.

My unpopular but realistic opinion as a successful financially app dev is - just post a Google compliant link to a payment system. Take the 15% hit. The payment link is likely to be more direct and user friendly, so you will likely end up earning more even after the 15% cut. Having a link to a website and then having users have to scroll to the bottom in order to donate means you are likely to be earning near $0 from it anyway.

The scanning is to take place within iCloud Photos, which handles images / videos etc on an individual basis. It would be a pretty easy thing to do for Apple to calculate hashes on these. I'm not sure how iOS handles archives, but it doesn't matter - remember it isn't 100% or 0% with these things - say only 50% of those people store images in iCloud Photo, catching out only 50% of those folk is still a good result.

This article focusses too much on the individual case, and not enough on the fact that Apple will need multiple matches to report someone. Images would normally be distributed in sets I suspect, so it is going to be easy to detect when someone is holding an offending set because of multiple matches. I don't think Apple are going to be concerned with a single hit. Here in the news offenders are reported as holding many thousands of images.

Once you've been around in this software business for long enough you see the same articles written over and over again... there will always be articles about estimating software, yet there is no solution to this problem.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter. Software devs are the lowest cog, they don't get to extend the delivery date. All the layers above - management, marketing, sales etc need a date to work to to deliver their work, and they generate the $$$. No-one cares if the software is low quality, as long as it is delivered. Dev team can do further updates to bug fix after delivery. The end.

An analogy... I live in Australia, here there are endless straight highways through the outback. Beside the highway there are thousands of huge termite mounds with thousands upon thousands of termites in each one. Termites live a pretty organised and civilised life in their mound, they even probably wander onto the highway a fair bit, but have no idea what they have walked on to, or furthermore conceive the big picture of what the purpose of the highway is or even that a city or town is at the end. The analogy is of course that we are the termites, and the universe is the highway, outback, roads and cities. It would take quite an inconceivable leap for a termite to stumble onto the beginning of the meaning of the highway, let alone everything else.

Very cool. Especially the code that moves pieces out of the way as other pieces jump over them or are removed from the board! A lot of programming in that.

A similar concept is the Snowy Hydro project in Australia - essentially it is a battery for clean energy generators such as wind and solar when they cannot generate. There are two lakes - one at the top of a mountain and one at the bottom. When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining the wind generators and the solar panels power pumps that pump water from the bottom lake up to the top lake. When the sun is down or the wind is not blowing and electricity cannot be generated from panels or wind, water is run using gravity from the top lake to the bottom lake through a turbine, generating electricity that way and ensuring constant supply.

There is more than two options - you can be anywhere in between - there is no need to choose one or the other. I find having a specific technical skill helpful in getting your foot in the door as employers are often looking to have their existing systems maintained. Other than that you can diversify as you want.

I don’t see users as the enemy! Where did you pull that absolutely stupid idea from? ** DON'T ATTACK DEVS **. YOUR BEEF IS WITH A FRUIT COMPANY. My post states the facts - advertisers used to pay for the apps - now this has been stopped so users now pay for the apps!

My business is more successful because of this change. Users love the content in my apps. This change has not and will not hurt me financially. I am trying to explain why the dev made that change to you! Attacking the dev or offering junior level inexperienced advice will make no difference. Please take note of the reason why and who made the change that did this to you.

Unfortunately Apple has made advertising in free apps unviable with their universally loved by users iOS14.5 update. "Stick it to the man!!!" Unfortunately, this means advertisers who funded free apps cannot pay for apps any longer. End users must start paying for apps now.

I have converted my apps to subscription now away from advertising. I am making a more steady income. I will convert my last app in the next month or two.

Apple sell more devices with this privacy change, and they get big profit in taking a 30% cut of subscriptions. They took 0% cut of advertising.

So many end users choose to abuse app developers who funded apps through advertising. Instead this is a self inflicted wound, end users support Apple making this privacy change, so now end users have to pay for apps instead of advertisers.

This is very true.

END USERS in particular do not give a rats about clean code or the number of code reviews that have been done. They only care that it works. Technical debt, refactoring, reuse? Nobody cares except developers. The paying customer is all that matters.

Well, I think this is true. Many devs are slaving over high quality software that is technically fine and a real achievement but nobody truly loves the niche except for them. I think the real talent is in writing software that other folk are inspired by and actually want. Too much focus on the technical side of things, not enough focus on the human side of things. But then, it is important to be true to yourself, if you love that software, then you love it. Depends on your reason for working on it, whether your profit is your own enjoyment or the enjoyment by others.

I am always going to use print to debug in every programming language I can until the day I die.