Gordonjcp

> Sorry, you can no longer watch OTA TV.

And nothing of value was lost.

You know what else? You probably first played it on a CRT, which was brighter with a far better gamut than a plasma or LCD TV, so it looked a lot brighter and clearer.

GTA:SA looks like a sad and dull imitation of itself on a modern TV.

Yeah this is where you start to see decompilers outputting C code that just looks like assembler written out as C. There was one I used to use years ago - can't remember the name, some odd commercial thing from one of the many commercial C products that never really took off - that would do a good job *mostly* but at some point start outputting blocks of code with lots of `register` variables in, and you knew it had gone out to lunch on that bit.

Well, think about it this way - suppose you have a block of C code and you compile it to object code, like:

    if (hitByMissile == True) {
      lives--;
      if (lives == 0) playing = False;
    }
    ; next address is 0x8f02

it might turn into:

    ld a, (4011h)
    jr z, 8f02h
    ld a, (4020h)
    dec a
    ld (4020h), a
    jr z, 8f02h
    xor a, a
    ld (0x4021h), a
    ; next address is 8f02h

That might disassemble back to C as:

    if (var4011 != 0) {
      var4020--;
      if (var4020 == 0) {
        var4021 == 0;
      }
    }

like that. Less readable, because we have no variable names, and not identical to the source code but probably close enough, but the important thing is we don't care if we understand it or not. If we declare a variable that our original code stores at 4020h in a 16-bit address space, but it ends up somewhere wildly different in our 32-bit address space because we're recompiling on a newer machine, we don't care - we just care that the name gets used consistently.

If you then read through the disassembled source you could start to piece together what the variables are, though.

> Leaves little time to learn anything else besides the ins and outs of the industry I’d think.

Yeah, in the music industry it's not like you ever have to deal with massive lists of numbers.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service got slated for having a series of ads run in the early 2000s telling people to just get a takeaway on their way home from the pub instead of trying to cook when they got in. The big complaint was that it was encouraging people to eat unhealthily, when presumably a drunk person getting in would be whipping up a nice wee quinoa, avocado and pak choi salad or something.

It cut fire deaths from chip pan fires to basically fuck all, within a month.

> I'd wager that you'd be surprised at the number of people who don't know what Microsoft Word/Excel are.

Presumably, anyone who has never had any kind of a job in any field ever, or been to any kind of school.

Why would they go to all the effort of making a fake phone and then CGIing in the details, when a device that looked and worked exactly as shown in the video existed in real life?

> because the most basic computer skills are now as important as knowing how to drive

Maybe not knowing how to *drive*, lots of people don't need to know that, but it's kind of up there with knowing how to read.

You know that most musicians didn't start off as professional musicians, right?

I can't imagine there's anyone who lives in a sufficiently technologically-literate world that they know how to use a mobile phone, and despite this has never heard of the second most commonly used bit of software in the workplace.

Yeah, exactly, and because it's so popular it's become the "go-to" for any fault - "oh it must be bad caps!" - and then you end up with perfectly good equipment getting ripped apart and cheap shitty Aliexpress electrolytics dropped in to replace perfectly good ones, with lots and lots of really poor soldering, dry joints and lifted pads everywhere. Oh and heaven help any ECOs made to the board, "oh someone had circuit-bent it and added all this blue wire to the back of the board so I took all that off", gawd help us.

The real fault is an 0.1μF disc ceramic, one of those little brown ones, that's gone leaky and now thinks it's a 1k resistor. Not that you'd know, with all the other iatrogenic faults the damn thing now has.

Awful. Just awful. The "it was circuitbent so I tidied it all up" thing was a Prophet 600 that I had to write off, it was so badly damaged.

So what's the equivalent for choosing a distro?

99.999% of people don't need to go off road, and only need a bog standard desktop distro.

Let's see, I think Lasermoon and Zipslack were on the cover CD with Computer Shopper in about what, 1993? Pink and yellow CD. I think I only binned it a couple of years ago - stupid of me!

This is actually a great way of running stuff in "foreign" distros where you can't guarantee the presence or absence of libraries.

For example DaVinci Resolve is packaged for (now quite old) CentOS but runs just fine installed on Ubuntu, with absolutely no problems at all. The only thing that might catch out the unwary is that CentOS packages a couple of libraries as default which Ubuntu doesn't but if you're savvy enough to edit video you're savvy enough to catch this.

You can also run Resolve in a Docker container so it "sees" a CentOS environment no matter what, and it's transparent across any other distro. There's no real need to do this, although it makes running more than one version easy.

> And what Linux OS should you target?

Linux is an OS.

It doesn't matter which distro you pick, because they're all the same.

Lasermoon for me, which was a slight fork of SLS.

Before that, whatever Linux it was it came on about half a dozen 1.44MB floppies. I remember it used a Linux 0.9 kernel, but not much else - except it was a Real Proper Unix System like I had at university, except *on my very own desktop PC*! With a compiler and everything! And SLIP!

It doesn't really matter which desktop you pick, they're all the same.

If you went to buy a car, would you be fatally paralysed by indecision at seeing two different makes that looked ever so slightly different parked side-by-side?

Of course not. That would be idiotic.

I'm currently spending a lot of time in La-La-Laplacian Land, so maybe my sense of humour is currently a bit warped. A bit like my filter responses, really.

You're never going to find electrolytics that have "gone bad" sitting on a shelf.

Over about 50 years, maybe.

Put it this way, I've replaced maybe a dozen "bad caps" in equipment in 35 years of repairing high-end musical kit, six of which were in one 1970s synthesizer made from very cheap parts.

But, I've done very well out of the fashion for "re-capping" equipment because I charge 300 quid before I even start to consider clearing a spot on the bench for stuff that's been "re-capped" before they bring it to me to fix.

As long as they haven't been sitting on the shelf since the 1950s, any capacitors you have lying around will be fine.

The electrolyte isn't milk. It doesn't go off.

You know all those folk who claim the Earth is flat? You know they're joking, right?

Man, it actually sounds like you've fallen for it too, or have I been whooshed?

But space is quantised, that's what Planck's Constant is.

The oddity we see with things at relativistic energies is simply because - as with all discretised representations of continuous-time systems - things get a bit fucky close to Nyquist, and the maths breaks down.

You're populating a tiny template with a tiny list of numbers to produce a tiny plaintext document that will cache like Scrooge McDuck.

Why do you think this is going to be a problem?

It's a joke, that people don't appear to "get". The more upset people get about "Flat Earthers", the funnier it is.

That doesn't really answer my question, though.

Why would you spend money to run a website?

Look at the video games industry. People travel from all over the world to study in *Dundee* of all places, which for the Americans here is about the side of Bridgeport, Connecticut, simply because the universities there offer the best courses possible about developing and marketing video games.

Why?

Because in the 1980s, when Dundee was the heroin death and teenage pregnancy capital of Europe and unemployment was at something like 45%, one of the employers that *was* there was Timex, where they made the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and so everyone had a ZX Spectrum because everyone's dad "knew a man down the pub who could get them". Everyone owned one, so everyone who had a modicum of talent could write games for them, and if your games were any good then within a day or two everyone in your high school had a copy of it.

Loads of folk in the tech industry who grew up in Scotland in the 1980s owe their livelihood to some guy in the Planet Bar in Lochee who could get knocked Spectrums for 100 quid...

> Regardless of if that upsets your sensibilities or not.

So you'd be happy if I surrounded your house with huge billboards covered in pictures of dicks, and puppies being thrown into scrap metal shredders?