FatActor

Just because he does "tame" things doesn't mean he's not abusing his privilege as an uber-rich white dude. He's a million times better person than Musk, but this is still immature behavior that not everyone could get away with because of what they look like. But hey, he's a hacker god so blank check I guess.

Depends on the job. Cutting unistrut is far more challenging than 80/20, it weighs a lot, and the connectors are expensive because they are engineered to bear significant loads. 80/20 is a little pricier per foot but it is much, much easier to work with for applications that don't need to withstand a nuclear strike.

> One man's snark is another man's war story.

This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.

That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.

What an interesting theory. Talking to new hires, they learned python because that's what they were taught in school. Maybe in the 1990's when Python was competing with PERL for 2nd generation scripting languages that was the case that enthusiasts picked it up (along with Java beans, it was the 90's. :), but Python is institutional now in CS coursework.

EDIT: I just realized this was 2004. And now I agree with him.

I don't see how that could have been accidentally discovered. It is so esoteric and time consuming, that even if someone owned an arcade and could set the machine to free play, what kind of thought process from historical hacks prior to 1982 would have inspired that kind of a search space? Much like easter eggs in early Microsoft Office products from ca. 1990, I can't imagine. Like maybe trying to run down a shot counter might have been on the agenda, but those two specific aliens just cinch it for me. Now, as to whether it is a bug or not.

Looking at the forensics of the original ROM at the provided URL[0], the fix is nontrivial. It looks like a bug, IMHO. But if it is a bug, who stumbled upon it? I would think that if the author put that in there to get the high score all the time, it certainly is obfuscated enough, but he would run the risk of being discovered. Perhaps the cheat is obfuscated in order to sneak it through code review and not be fired by Namco?

What really supports the bug theory is that the flight pattern of the far left bees has to be altered to account for their location on the screen. This REALLY feels like a bug, because when I'm trying to alter a corner case in code, I can rarely see the second-order consequences without code coverage/fuzzing. This is a total code smell IMHO.

But again, how would someone even exploit this flaw without the ROM. Which leads me back to the intentional cheat by the programmer.

I'm legit ambivalent about this. But if I was pushed, I'd have to say it was an intentional cheat slipped into the code, because programmers were just too good back then.

TEAM CHEAT FTW.

[0] https://www.computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Galaga/

There's a reason your being down-voted, and its not a hive mind, or a conspiracy, or a personal grudge against you. That's simply what it is like to be "wrong". Saying what you said is just playing the victim card.

Inkscape has a plugin for gear teeth pitches. I no longer have the link to it (or the install because it was 13 years ago), but I was able to cut a whole bunch of HDPE gears. THe next hard part was getting hubs to match with them. :|

"real" handwriting also gets tired so it becomes progressively worse. unless the person writes a lot. which is why you see people who write left-to-write on a blank page compress and slant upward as they go.

You keep saying less is less more is more. That's a truism which is completely orthogonal to the point, yet you seem to be hung up on it to the exclusion of everything else every other commenter has said to you. Consider that just for a moment.

Again, black and white thinking doesn't solve the problem. It just alienates people, and sometimes worse.

I agree with that, as do most people. What I object to is that calories-in-calories-out is the ONLY thing at play, and people claiming "simple physics" are working against any deeper understanding of the issues. I think this side of the argument is "Just eat less and you won't be fat. Duh." What they don't understand is that if a body has a hormonal anomaly, it might need to 5000 kcal/day just meet the 1500kc/day basic metabolic rate because the other 2500 kcal is being metabolized into fat by a broken endocrine system. If they drop down to 1500 kcal/day, only 300kc of that is going towards keeping the body running. It is completely out of their control how the calories are used due to their bodies, so CIn=COut is meaningless. The obesity epidemic is not completely about eating too much (which is part of it), but is about the environmental factors impacting how bodies actually work. If it was just Cin/Cout, gastric bypass would solve the problem, but that is not available to people that are suffering such hormonal disruptions because they would just die or be eating nonstop.

Who generated the heat that you measured in the calorimeter?

Gut biome bacteria consumed an amount of those calories. How many? It varies from person to person.

So calories in = calories out, but we don't know how many were used by the person, how many by the gut flora, and how many were excreted do to inability to metabolize. Ergo, hardly basic physics.

Reductionism is only useful if you know how to apply it.

One problem I always run into with rotary motion: gearing. Finding gears of the right diameter, thickness, and thread pitch is always such a stumbling block for me. Most sites that sell gears to fit their motors have a small selection, and sites that sell gears are very hard to navigate (only to find out they don't sell in quantities <1,000 units). I end up having them laser cut out of HDPE online. Wish there was an easier solution.

But you've moved on to a new flag, so I cannot let the association sink in as I have forgotten the flag already.

It says "Learn the flags..."

But doesn't give me the correct answer when I'm wrong, so I can't learn.

Aw man, really? I still have my 5. I was hoping some day it would be a fun retro computer experience. Eh, the Lion battery will probably be dead in a decade anyway.

No billion dollar company is anywhere near as glib has the author makes them out to be. Maybe my experience varies, but the European companies I've worked with have strict cybersecurity liability, and they take every aspect of security seriously and do not just pat themselves on the back smugly, as OP portrays. Maybe this was the case in the 90's, but it sure is not the case today.

EDIT: I deleted most of my post because I found it was repeated up and down the comments which I am so relieved to see. I kept my post because I want newcomers to hear as many voices in objection to OP's outdated essay as possible.

> But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.

We can see that.

Society of mind. We're all just a bunch of different people in the same head.

I've been using TT for decades. Their "tricks" are basically asking you 2 or three times during the process if you want to pay for a new feature. Pretty lame for tricks. But annoying still.

Also: just be rich. They don't investigate non-billionaires. Jeez.

I restarted mine at 41. I was lucky to have saved money, but I just walked out of my 25+ year job with a 2 week notice. Decompressed for a year living off savings, and went from hardware to software engineering. Still engineering, but radically different tasks: I went from designing memory architectures (boring as hell) to writing web and mobile apps. (I also went from working with creepy old dudes to more exciting younger people.)

It took a lot of therapy and coaching and crying and some medication, however.

You probably can't do this alone, so definitely get a therapist because it sounds like you are depressed.

Reading this caused me to do a 180 in my life, both job and marriage. I changed both within 1 year of reading it.

https://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

The 2000+ billionaires in the world sure do have amazing timing. Truly flawless almost.

> People are expecting more and more handouts and no one wants to pay for it.

Do you mean the super rich that want more of the tax revenue for themselves, or boomers, or who are "people"?

I get tired of hearing day after day about billionaires making not just billions, but 10's and 100's of billions without doing much of anything except having impeccable timing... and a lot of money to invest.

a solution has been around for ages: lockstep processors.

https://www.microcontrollertips.com/dual-core-lockstep-proce...

https://www.synopsys.com/designware-ip/processor-solutions/a...

Saturated arithmetic instructions do not do this.

As a U.S.-er, this is how I feel when I see Europe with their health care.

> For a start, if you're monitoring your whole house, getting to zero load while keeping the sensor powered on is not trivial :)

Hahahaha! Duh. I just assumed you could power cycle the target (which you could but not without potentially drastic consequences).

thanks for the follow-up.