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ant512

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I've got a British driving license and an American driving license. The British driving license was hard work. The American driving license involved little more than proving I could make the car go forwards and that I had a pulse.

There's really a 40% failure rate? That's insane given how easy it is to pass the test.

This is the same Sony that was famously hacked in 2014:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_hack

From the Wikipedia page:

“The hackers involved claim to have taken more than 100 terabytes of data from Sony”

“The data included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, e-mails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of then-unreleased Sony films, and other information.”

The YouTube mistake sounds to me like a publicity stunt, but “hilariously insecure” isn’t necessarily an incorrect assessment of Sony’s infrastructure.

That's called out at the end of the article:

"But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."

Before I bought my first iPod I got a Sony Network Walkman NW-E3. It was about the size of a packet of gum, had 64MB of flash memory, and was so unrelentingly awful that I swore I would never buy another piece of Sony hardware. I don't remember ever feeling so furious about any other purchase I've made.

That the iPod dominated the industry really shouldn't be a surprise when Sony was producing junk like the NW-E3.

A bunch of these were also Spectrum hits: Heartland, the Monty Mole series, and Everyone's A Wally are some stand-outs. California Games got converted to pretty much every platform around.

It's worth pointing out that CrashPlan's business client app uses Electron (because the Java client app for home users wasn't bloated enough). That's reason enough for me to look elsewhere.

No sane company is still using Windows XP, given that support ended 3 years ago and development ended a decade ago.

The Atari Lynx wasn't massive because it needed to be; the creators listened to their customers:

"In all the focus group testing, and we did a lot of it with consumers, we had a bunch of different models that we showed them," Mical recalled in an interview with 1UP.com. "[We asked] "which one do you like? Which one would you like to have it be?" We showed them big ones; we showed them little ones. We showed them gigantic ones; we showed them little tiny ones. They loved the big ones. They all told us, 'Make it big. Make it big. This one feels like it's substantial and I'm really getting my money's worth.' They all told us to make it big, so we made it big. And when it came out on the market, they all said, 'Why is this damn thing so big?' It'd drive me nuts, because the original Lynx was mostly air space inside. We put it in, because that's what they told us they wanted."

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/too-good-for-its-day-ataris-...

The Amiga disk format held 880K. The original version of Lemmings was a 2 disk release with an animated intro, but later (cheaper or pack-in) versions shipped on 1 disk with the intro removed.

Microsoft spent years telling people that OSS == communism and that OSS was stealing their IP.

I imagine that the MS developers who believed the FUD have a hard time accepting that going open-source won't cause Ghost Stalin to appear and steal their children because it contradicts what MS told them for all those years. For the same reason, existing OSS developers have a hard time accepting that MS has suddenly stopped trying to undermine their legitimacy or squash them with dubious lawsuits.

Honestly, what did MS expect?

Cybiko 11 years ago

I worked at a company that wanted to use these as cheap and disposable PDAs. At the time the Cybiko company was collapsing but they kept promising that new hardware was on the way, presumably to keep us buying their existing stock.

IIRC the SDK consisted of a (limited) C compiler that produced bytecode that the Cybiko ran in a virtual machine. The VM was intended to future-proof the device in case they decided to switch CPU architectures somewhere down the line. A little over-engineered, given its eventual fate.

We got hold of the source code for the Cybiko's web browser because we wanted to do something similar. A PC ran a server component and did all of the hard work interacting with the internet and parsing HTML, while the Cybiko ran a client that connected to the PC over its RF hardware. In the end we didn't get very far - it was my first C project, the SDK wasn't great, and the browser source was written in Russian.

I still have two unopened Xtremes somewhere.

Tell me what the number represents rather than what the value of the number is. How about this?

    #define BUFFER_LENGTH 2048
    new int[BUFFER_LENGTH];