I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.

And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.

We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.

As much as I look back at the simplicity (Apache config was not that difficult for a small site, at least with Apache 2.0), the part of me that operates production software these days gets anxiety the idea of it all.

And yet, when I wrote a small website to host my wedding website last year, it was indeed Linux, (some webserver), Postgres and PHP, with me copying files manually to FTP. It was probably nginx but you know what, I paid a company £50 for a large amount of storage, bandwidth, a domain and SSL certificate, for year, and everything went dandy. Horses for courses and all that.

- an herb (US), where the "h" is silent

- a herb (UK)

Cue confusion about "an historic".

USB-C: You break the stem, you have a useless device and functioning cable

Lightning: You break the stem, you have a functioning device and useless cable.

One of these is clearly more optimal considering the cost difference between the two. Anecdotally, I have had problems with USB-C ports that I did not have with Micro-USB and (so far) with Lightning (admittedly I have only been an iPhone user for a year or so).

Of course, this directive is the correct stance and direction - having a standard and forcing it on everyone. It's just a shame the one they chose may be inferior.

The minimum requirements to play this game were a 200MHz CPU w/ MMX and 64MB RAM - I was pretty close to this baseline. So anyway, I discovered that the game played at much better FPS (like 30 instead of 5) if you turned the music off - but only when playing MP3 - CD Audio had no hit. Now perhaps the game used a sub-par audio codec, but that single MP3 decode stream was enough to make the game unplayable.

Anyway that's not to say that I would expect MP3 decoding to be a problem in 2014, in fact you can likely play audio with no noticable increase on CPU usage, but when you have multi-stream audio (think voices, background music, sound effects from various channels - guns, explosions, etc.) I can see it starting to add up - especially when the CPU is already constrained for the graphics, game logic and perhaps of course everyone's favourite anti-piracy/anti-cheat logic.

[^1] For younger readers, yes, CD Drives used to come with built-in DACs and a special cable you could hook directly into the audio card, allowing you to listen to CD Audio on PC for "basically" free in terms of CPU cycles.

I have set Slack up so that certain things alert me, and most channels are just muted, but as others pointed out more fine-grain controls would be even better. Really just "only notifications for DMs for these people" would be a great QoL.

[Input Data, maybe null] -> Validate field is not null -> Call this method with the assertion.

This is a small bug-bear for me with nullable types and I wish there was a better way to do it, but many languages allow you to smart-cast away nulls, but only within the local scope. If you want to pass a struct-type around which has nullable fields, but you have already checked for non-null (like this one) you need to convert to a different struct-type, which doesn't have the nullability on its fields. I can't think of a good way round this - as you say with the unit test remark, there is nothing to stop another piece of code calling this method with nulls.

I mean honestly if you could be a lord with 1 square foot, there would be a lot of lords in Scotland due to the ownership nature of buying a house (very little of this "leasehold" thing that's prevalent in England). My parents would be a lord and lady, so would their parents...

I've not encountered these ads though, I guess it would be pretty dumb to geo-target it to people living in Scotland.

Edit, on the other hand, if you buy a house and let it out, I guess you can be a land lord, even if you still can't call yourself lord.

[^1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/researchers-demonstr...

Forget the cost, but the waste!

I remember fondly that it took less than half an hour for a fresh XP install with no SP to get the dreaded "your PC will reboot in 60 seconds" shutdown window.

This is a fairly common trick, you just run the debugger method in a setTimeout loop since it's a no-op if the debugger isn't open. It's a common tactic used by quasi-illicit sport streaming websites that are usually filled with ads.

There's a button in Chrome Dev Tools to disable breaking on breakpoints that gets round this.

Edit: Also, I was sure Jigsaw was approved in the end; that's why we've had to wait until September.

For example, in back-end Java dev, I never use singleton objects in the truest sense of the pattern; singletons cannot be mocked out to test units in isolation. Instead, instantiate it with a dependency injection container and let your framework (Guice, Spring) wire things together. In effect, your global state becomes contained within a single context. Nothing stopping you having two contexts in the same runtime environment though.

I find static methods are okay if they are concise and have no state; in particular if I'd never want to test the caller without it making the call to the static method anyway. This is becoming more important with Java 8's lambdas and needing to write helper methods.

On the other hand, the cost of doing this might not be worthwhile for a game dev? Do game devs write unit tests? I have no idea.

Safari is now unsupported because Spotify deprecated their Flash website in favour of HTML5 + Widevine. Safari doesn't support Widevine, so can't use the new player. However, Safari on iOS never supported Flash so the old version of the Spotify player wouldn't have worked either.