JeremyReimer

phpBB added a mobile theme that works pretty well, but many sites didn't bother to upgrade.

Mostly this was because the upgrade was difficult and required multiple steps (first updating to the latest sub-version, then to the major version, then to the latest sub-version of the major version) and if anything went wrong in any of the steps you could take down your board.

And if you had any custom code, as the forum operators at Ars Technica had, it was just too difficult and too much of a time investment to even attempt.

So phpBB, which was one of the most dominant forum software applications when forums were at their peak, became known as "old-school" and "non mobile-friendly" when that was technically not true but it was de-facto true.

The Ars Technica forums today still exist but they are difficult to view on mobile, and as a consequence their traffic has declined significantly in the last ten years, despite traffic to the main site increasing.

Thanks! I think it's just a combination of the limited graphics character set on the Heathkit, plus eight years of practice (at the time) making games using it.

The stuffed animals are from my childhood, so I kept them on my childhood computer. I think they're happy there. :)

I'm really enjoying it so far. It seems to fit with my mental model of making video games, which basically ended when I was 15 and writing games in MBASIC on my Heathkit (and later QuickBasic on MS-DOS, but I sort of stopped making games at that point) Obviously the language is very different and it's object-oriented, which MBASIC definitely was not, but it sort of feels... similar somehow? I can't really explain it.

Some things about the GML language are a bit odd, and sometimes it seems like people on the forums believe wrong things about it (I read more than one person complaining that you couldn't define your own functions, which is not correct, but the docs could be a lot clearer on that) But overall I'm happy enough with it.

I'm recreating a game I wrote in interpreted BASIC back in 1987 [1] and so far I've got the levels, basic player movement, simple enemy AI, and a very basic game loop. It's nothing fancy but I'm learning a lot so far.

[1] https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=282

Congrats on releasing the game! Great work!

I'm 49 and I have basically the same story you did... and also share the same secret dream to write games "one day", so I'm starting really small with a simple little 2D game in GameMaker Studio. So far it's slow going but super fun. But you've inspired me to keep going, so thanks!

EDIT: Purchased! Looking forward to playing it!

The publishing industry was disrupted by technology in 2007 when Amazon released the Kindle. It took a few years, but for a while, independent book authors were rivalling the "Big Five" publishers in terms of both sales volume and books sold.

Part of this was driven by the big publishers' response to indies: they raised the price of their own eBooks to protect their hardcover market. They even illegally colluded with each other, along with Apple, to force these higher prices across the industry.

But they were sued and lost, and the result was a lowering of big publisher eBook prices across the board. On the independent side, the problem was that too many people were publishing too many books. It was impossible to keep up, and there was no good system for finding the "best" independent authors, since tastes are so subjective and the vast majority of independent authors didn't have any money to spend on marketing anyway.

So that leads us to today, where the "Big Four" (trying to become the Big Three) still have access to their promotional machinery, which includes retail bookstores. There are a very few insanely successful independent authors, and a veeeeeery long tail of folks that have no way of getting noticed in the crowd.

Still, the sales volume of traditional publishing and independent publishing remains about equivalent even today (it's hard to get exact numbers because Amazon doesn't like giving them out, but apps like KindleSpy offer a broad estimate) It's just that the latter is spread out among many more authors.

I believe the case for micropayments was shot down back in 2002 when Scott McCloud first proposed it as an option for webcomic authors in his comic post "I Can't Stop Thinking" (the original no longer exists at his site, but various rebuttals [1] are still around)

Basically, people hate microtransactions. They hate the very idea of paying per article. They don't want to do it.

Ars, among many other sites, offers yearly subscriptions with various benefits (such as no ads) and that business model has worked well for them for many years.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/magic-its-what...

Kind of like this: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/07/the-fullness-o...

I had a similar experience with a BASIC game I wrote in 1987, which I revived recently in an emulator - the code itself was copied directly from ancient hard-sectored 5.25" floppy disks into a virtual disk image.

The emulator had a bug in it, though-- it would scroll up the entire terminal if the static 25th line ended with an Enter or line feed, something that didn't happen on the original H/Z-89 hardware. I fixed the game by adding a single semicolon to the end of the PRINT statement.

I wrote a little bit about the game and my feelings on reviving it here: https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=282

The distinctions between volatile and non-volatile memory weren't always so distinct!

"Another interesting property of core was that it is a non-volatile system, unlike most of its predecessors. The magnetic field in each ferrite bead is quite durable, and unless the core system is exposed to a strong magnetic source, the state of the memory should last almost indefinitely, even with no power.

That means that all those old computers in storage somewhere, in museums, in landfills or wherever they may be, likely still contain the last program they ever ran. And If you could find a way to power one on, that code could actually run again.

Spooky."

Just to save everyone a Google, you can find it here. https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ (shameless plug) I actually wanted to write the series in order to answer the question for myself of why the Amiga was so unique, as I never actually owned one. I feel like I found the answer by the end. :)

You reminded me of a time in high school when I worked for the local library. The librarian had a perverse habit of closing the windows in the back room during the summer, making it unbearably hot. My mother, who worked there full-time as the Children's Librarian--the Librarian's direct subordinate--told me that during winter this woman would open up the windows and make everyone freeze.

So while I worked on a program in FoxPro to automatically print out new catalog cards, I also wrote a small program in QuickBasic to print out (depending on the time of year) a message saying "OPEN THE WINDOW!" or "CLOSE THE WINDOW!" (the latter signed by "The Frozen Ghost") and then pause the computer for a good minute or so just to make sure somebody read it.

For good measure, I made the AUTOEXEC.BAT file and my program read-only, and then deleted ATTRIB.EXE from the hard disk so that it would at least be somewhat annoying to remove.

Years later I got a call from an IT tech who wanted to ask me some questions about DOS (he never specifically said why!) and I feigned ignorance. It felt good.

I'm happy to hear that more people are discovering this article series. It was my (very) long-running dream to write this, and I'm happy that Ars Technica supported me during the entire journey. Plenty of Amiga people back in the day ended up having fascinating careers in video, television, and movies, and I'm in touch with (and even working with) some of them today.

These are all great examples. I would add "Adios", which came out recently, is short and bittersweet, and has some of the best writing I've ever seen in a video game.

I think the idea is that a UBI would provide only enough money for subsistence, and the human drive for greater wealth and status would continue unabated. Status and meaning are certainly important, and people would continue to seek those out.

It's possible that many more people would want to become entrepreneurs, given that there would be a social safety net if they failed. Right now, most entrepreneurs come from an upper middle-class background, often with financial assistance and cushioning from their parents.

These two types are often called "Plotters" and "Pantsers", with the idea that the Pantser writes by the "seat of their pants".

One thing that doesn't get talked about much is the concept of a third type of writer, the hybrid writer. They will figure out their book's theme, title, three or five act structure, characters, major plot points, and the ending all ahead of time. But this is just a skeleton, an outline. Like a fractal, it gets fleshed out at the time of writing. Writing proceeds linearly from beginning to end, much like the Pantser. When the novel is finished, there are still editing tasks and possible changes to be done.

I've written all five of my novels using a hybrid approach, and I wouldn't want to change. Every author is different.

I've noticed that other YouTubers, for example the Game Grumps, have stated that they cannot mention "Covid" in their videos for fear of being demonetized or taken down. To get around it, they refer to the situation as the "Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour" instead.

Agreed. I only found out about the Dream Machine from Hacker News (I think it was Alan Kay who recommended it) and it was absolutely the best book ever written on the topic.

I was the final president of the Panorama Amiga Club, a division of the Commodore Computer Club based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Our last formal meeting was probably around 2009, although I kept going to lunch on Saturdays with three of the group's members until a couple of years ago.

I was never around for the heyday of the club in the 1980s, when they would rent out the giant auditorium at Simon Fraser University, invite distinguished guests like Jay Miner, and run daisy-chained rows of floppy drives multitasking the mass copying of software. Back then I had a PC-XT that had one color (orange) and one sound (beep), and had heard of Amigas and their thousands of colors and multitasking operating systems only in whispers and legends, as if they were inhabiting a parallel universe much more advanced than our own.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the group would meet for lunch every Saturday at the Royal City Cafe in New Westminster, near the geographic center of the Lower Mainland. That's when I joined them to start writing my series of articles on the history of the Amiga for Ars Technica.

I was pleasantly surprised that Ars re-ran this story. It was one of my favorites to write. Also probably the most popular single article I ever did.

I'm working on a 2.0 release for newLISP on Rockets: http://newlisponrockets.com

It's a rapid development web framework written in newLISP, with inspiration (and many many ideas) taken from Dragonfly.

I had stopped working on it for a few years while I worked on other projects, but I wanted to make a new and updated personal website, so I've updated the framework to also include a basic blog with comments and a discussion forum, and some simple customization options for administrators.

Eating my own dogfood (as it were) has been an interesting and fun experience. I now have three sites running on the latest version of Rockets 2.0.

I really missed working with LISP and it's a lot of fun to get back to it!

You can find out on his blog (cringely.com). The TL;DR is that he mostly does consulting for startups and writes his own columns on the tech industry at his own pace. A few years back he did a Kickstarter for a $100 Minecraft server with his teenage kids that failed. The blowback from the failure and his poor communication about it has at times taken over the blog comments.

For a while he did a series of columns exposing the decline and mismanagement at IBM; he eventually turned these into an ebook that I purchased and thought was a reasonably interesting read.

More recently he had cataract surgery and had to move to a new home after his old one was damaged in the California wildfires.

Mass Effect Andromeda was no more a multiplayer shooter than Mass Effect 3 was. The multiplayer was optional. Andromeda had other problems, but it wasn't quite as bad a game as the Internet made it out to be. It just wasn't nearly as good as the opening game of the original series.

I think this attitude might have something to do with the volume of emails that people receive. I'm a minor writer for Ars Technica and I always answer every email I get about my articles (or about anything) but then again I only get about five emails per month. It's easy and fun to do at that volume. If I got 500 or 5000, this would be a different story.

I think it's because Curiosity was a rover and Insight is only a lander. A lander can have rockets on the bottom that slow its descent, but a rover can't, as then the wheels won't work. So the "helicopter drop" puts the rockets on a platform far above the rover (so the exhaust won't damage it) and then it flies away once the rover is on the surface.

I'm sorry you've had bad experiences with newLISP evangelists. In my experience, every single language has overly eager evangelists, and it's best not to let them affect one's overall view of things.

I am a huge newLISP advocate, and I would never dream of claiming that the language was a) first at anything, b) first to be used for practical applications, or c) does not have any limitations or flaws.

I chose to investigate the language about six years ago because I wanted to create web applications with Lisp, and I was having a lot of difficulty getting Common Lisp and Hunchentoot working (purely because of my own ignorance, I'm sure).

Newlisp, and the Dragonfly web framework, had the following advantages to me at the time:

0. It had really clear and easy to understand documentation

1. It was easy for me to get started

2. The syntax was really clean and simple

3. It had native support for parsing XML into S-expressions in a simple way that worked even with very complex XML (which was the case with the application I wanted to build at the time)

4. When combined with Dragonfly, it made it possible to create web applications that were really really fast.

I liked it so much that I ended up making my own web framework, newlisponrockets.com, based on Dragonfly. Since then I've used this framework to make my own website and to create internal tools and prototypes at work.

I don't consider myself a great or knowledgeable programmer, and I can't refute any of the people on Hacker News who mention that newLISP lacks this feature or has this poor design decision. I'm sure both of these things are true. I would never try to sell the language with an Amway-style sales pitch, or claim that it could do things that other languages couldn't.

What I do claim is that it was (and is) a very helpful and useful language for me. That's all.

You're correct. Windows NT 3.1 was visually nearly identical to Windows 3.1. This was part of the reason for releasing a 1.0 product with a 3.1 version number.

I'm not sure it's fair to tar all newLISP advocates with the same brush. I understand the design choices that Lutz Mueller made, and I can understand how they might be considered unsatisfactory by other Lisp users. That's fine-- I don't expect newLISP to be everything to everybody, and I don't consider it to be the be-all and end-all of languages.

I do find it to be very lightweight and flexible, with excellent documentation and a good built-in library. This makes it useful as a scripting language and for rapid prototyping. I wouldn't recommend it for very large-scale tasks or for projects developed by large teams.

I'd start with the newLISP documentation, particularly the Code Patterns page: http://www.newlisp.org/CodePatterns.html

This is what I learned the language from, and after I got a handle on it I just used their reference manual: http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/manual_frame.html

I'm planning on writing some "intro to web development with Rockets" white papers, but work is keeping me really busy at the moment.

Hi there! I fell in love with newLISP a few years ago, mostly for its clean documentation, the fact that everything seemed to make sense, and the fact that it was small and fast.

I found the newLISP web framework Dragonfly and adopted it to build a prototype website for my previous company. I used Solr for the document storage engine, and used newlisp's excellent native XML conversion to convert an ugly XML feed into a newLISP list and then into individual Solr documents. Then I used Dragonfly to write a front-end searching application that was launched to a select group of our customers. newLISP made it really easy to prototype rapidly and deliver new features quickly.

Dragonfly stopped being updated, so I decided I wanted to make my own web framework. That became newLISP on Rockets (www.newlisponrockets.com) and I released the source on GitHub.

Although I haven't updated the newLISP on Rockets website much lately, it's mostly because I'm too busy using Rockets in my current job. I built a searching application for all our documentation, and now I'm busy building business intelligence stuff.

It's nothing too fancy, and I don't consider myself a great programmer at all. But I love the fact that newLISP allowed me to make all these things quickly and with few lines of code, and it's easy for me to maintain them afterwards. That's the true value that newLISP has for me.

Macs aren't the titans, although it's worth noting that the Macintosh's market share has crept up over the last few years from a low of 2.5 percent to a current value of about 12 percent (stats like Netmarketshare measure installed base, which is not quite the same thing)

But I believe the poster was saying that Apple is now a titan, which is true when you look at mobile devices (which now dwarf PC sales in terms of raw numbers). Microsoft has been failing in mobile for years, which makes the old Apple-Microsoft rivalries seem quaint.