pathartl

Agreed. I'm also left handed and have my mouse to the left of the keyboard with the buttons swapped. It's amazingly effective.

I've only just gotten into film, being a total amateur with digital as well. Mostly because my parents were photographers for 40 years, so we have a Jobo ATL 2500 autolab and a FlexTight Precision II scanner. I'm honestly not sure I would have even tried film without them.

Wow, surprisingly these aren't too badly prices these days. I'm fortunate enough to be able to shoot with a Mamiya 6, but not paying an arm and a leg for lenses is mighty attractive.

Not that I know of. https://pinballbasement.com/ Looks like the 11 stuff is not finished or sold out atm. I believe he was running into supply chain issues last year.

Yep, friends with the guy from Pinball Basement who makes the System 11 boards. It was actually done by licensing the designs from Williams, so that's cool. They're still quite expensive, but it's great from a preservation perspective.

No reason to forbid cables when you can just remove physical ports.

And except for Edge having a compatibility mode

My home fiber connection is unfortunately behind a CGNAT. However, I was surprised the other day that somehow Valheim/Playfab was able to punch a hole through both my NAT and the CGNAT. I'm assuming this is some sort of UPnP trickery, but I haven't been able to determine if it's the application's doing or my gateway sending a request to the CGNAT.

That's the problem, they don't want kids to actually learn. They view teachers as glorified babysitters.

Ah okay yeah that's a huge issue.

Does it need to be 64-bit?

100%. It's important to note that doing so also doesn't make you complicit. I have a general disdain for the "do your own research" type of people because often they're not trying to seek out actual education, they're just trying to bolster some sort of preconception they have.

I remember first coming across the scroll at the beginning of the game. "Surely this isn't intentional? I have some sort of mod installed don't I?"

Yep, my first TES was Oblivion and I loved it so much that I tried going back to Morrowind. I don't mind having to read and I don't mind walking, but holy hell the combat makes the game almost inaccessible.

Control is such a great representation of what a modern game can be. For example, with newer games I have a hard time picking out enemies and items on screen. Control solves this by making the enemies a bright red.

Absolutely. I live in a completely different state and I'm pretty unaffected by this whole tragedy/negligence. I could sit and speculate about what actually happened, but what does that do other than spend energy on something that I'm not actually involved with?

I think it's a trait in the community. I remember the days sitting in an IRC channel listening to some bootleg live podcast/radio show broastcast over Icecast. It was sorta like pirate radio for a bit. Then podcasts started to show up more and more (in big part due to the iPod) and having a big publishing network wasn't really a thing. Sure, people could use iTunes, but a ton of us were just dropping MP3's from someone's site onto whatever MP3 player we had at the time.

People get caught up on versions of the framework. Handy guide:

.NET Framework (v1.0-4.8) - 4.8 Currently still supported, but don't build anything new in it. It only gets very minor updates. Not cross platform (Mono can help, but euuughhh), slower, stuck with C# 7.3.

.NET Core (v1.0-3.1) - Out of support, transition period between .NET Framework and modern .NET. Cross platform support, some support for AOT compile.

.NET (v6-8) - LTS every other version starting with 6, 36 months LTS, cross platform, magnitudes faster than .NET Framework. Successor to Framework and Core. Many features of .NET Framework have been abstracted to NuGet packages.

.NET Standard (v1.0-2.1) - Interop API specification for Framework/Core/.NET. Write a class library that targets .NET Standard and you can use it in more than one runtime. You'll see a lot of NuGet packages target Standard. If you're writing a class library you should probably target Standard.

"Core" products/packages - Many packages/libraries have been renamed to include "Core" in the title. ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, etc. These are libraries/packages that only have implement their core functionality. For example, ASP.NET Core has some basic implementations, but does not include things like Web API, MVC, Authorization, Razor. If you build an ASP.NET Core project you'll be pulling in a lot of packages based on your needs. The features/libraries are more atomic and less reliant on a full version update of ASP.NET Core.

I think these are just growing pains. The migration from 6 to 7 to 8 is going to be more fully representative of how .NET is going to work. There was a lot of stuff with Core 2/3 that wasn't fully fleshed out and is generally why we avoided building anything in it. And yes, 4.8 is still getting security updates, but .NET 4.x is effectively dead and almost no new projects should be built in it (yes Winforms people I hear your screams)

We're in a rental for the month in Florida. We're from the midwest, so where gas is used for almost everything. The backlash against heat pumps and electric stoves, ovens, water heaters, etc is normally the ol' "gas gets hotter and is faster" mantra. The unit we're renting is exactly why people think that way. The water heater is old, nor well maintained, and small. The stove is your old coil-top running off a 120v@30A circuit and the heat pump is an old unit that uses the hot water for emergency heat.

So yes, based on this experience it really sucks. That's what you get for the cheapest obsolete tech. It'd be great if people realized there's better electric appliances out there.

Duplicating = copy/paste digital binaries, replicating = reimplementing the codebase.

I agree. I think a lot of copyright/patent laws have gotten in the way of game preservation. What bothers me is many people in the industry have held onto old code/assets over the years, but have no legal way of sharing that with others. It's odd, sheet music can be documented and distributed, but with games being more complex and tangled it's almost an impossibility to have clean-room REs/decompilations. And yet distribution of source code while maintaining copyright is pretty darn easy. Release the source, protect the assets behind copyright.

I've been going through a bunch of old games recently for a project involving a regular LAN party some friends and I hold. If I can make a suggestion, bundle as much documentation as you can with the dedicated server.

It's infuriating how many times I've run into games where the potential commands/switches have been documented online across 30 websites, but every site is incomplete. Tons of games don't even document how to set the listen address or port, or even what runtimes might be needed in order to run.

Games are this interesting medium of art where they're really not easily replicated, but very easy duplicated. There's practically no equivalent to a cover for a song that exists for a game. You can distribute a ROM, maybe swap some assets, but the code only exists in the binary it was compiled to. It was only up until recently (with decompilations) that a game was effectively set in stone unless it was open-sourced.

I don't know. I think it's silly for decades-old-games to run into licensing issues when trying to go open source. The tech is effectively obsolete except in the instance of that specific game.

A lot of your concern of older games has been fixed over time by the development of emulators and wrappers. Multiplayer (and live DRM) components of modern games can't be easily RE'd in most cases. Especially with services like Xbox Live the most helpful data is actually packet captures where one can actually go through and replicate the protocol used.

I honestly would challenge you to find games from the mid 90's+ that won't work on a modern machine. Many times if there's a feature that straight up doesn't work it's due to online services being discontinued. There's been some work done to rebuild services like GameSpy or Westwood Online, but once more forms of encryption and anti-cheat or DRM were implemented in these sorts of services, the harder it's going to be to preserve their experience.

This is what I struggle with. The most important things to me are performance and compatibility. Performance/watt means almost nothing to me if I get 80% of the performance and can only run a limited catalog.

Yes, this will change over time. Unless there's a compatibility layer that's perfect though, I don't see this whole "x86 will be dead in 5 years" argument. That's what they said almost 15 years ago.

The sticks take some calibration to work properly. I enjoy the small deadzones compares to stock.

While I realize it's not a solution to the issue you raised, it's worth pointing out that Microsoft does a decent* job of documenting the types of telemetry taken across the Windows platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-...

* When I say decent, I mean this absolutely should be the bare minimum, but this type of thing feels rare in the industry.

Consoles/PC gamepass. It doesn't really matter either way, once you run it in Proton with Vulkan there's almost no performance hit.

Yes, but you can't join crossplay-enabled servers with the Linux binary.