TA is more a game of raw tonnage, not of finesse and subtlety.

As the same time, original TA is notorious for not being finely tuned or balanced. And I'm sure that's much more important in PvP.

But in PvE flinging two industrial powerhouses against each other, where subtlety is replaced by 100, throwaway, Flash tanks, it's just a different play experience.

I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.

Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.

You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.

All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.

But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.

The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.

And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.

Loved that game.

I used to be a regular listener to his show, but I haven't heard it in over 30 years. I can't even say that he'd make sense to me now today.

I had a friend with a 10" Meade with which not much happened. Just a bear to lug around and set up and mess with, not even including trying bumble through getting astrophotography started.

But the new-ish Smart Scopes looks fun and accessible, so gonna see if I can get one of those to play with.

I'm waiting to swap out my last gen Intel iMac with a new M5 mini of some kind, with the eye to hopefully be able to run some models locally. I envision a mini (heh) arms race to simply swapping out an M(X-1) for an M(X) annually as this field shakes out.

The threading macros are (as I understand it) pure sugar.

Turning (-> (gather my-list) uppercase-list sort) into (sort (uppercase-list (gather my-list))).

In contrast to, say, Java (I can't speak to the code above):

        List things = thingIds.stream()
                .map(model::findThing)
                .filter(Objects::nonNull)
                .toList();

I wish CL had something like the Java streams (maybe it does).

I find them simply difficult to read and use today because of that.

So, I just use a HP48 app on my phone. It's not as good, lacking the tactile response of the keyboard. But it's close.

I used to program the 48's. You think laptops are convenient, wait until you try coding in bed on a 48. Very comfortable, if you can stay awake :).

Not to mention all the junk on the streets: the oil, anti-freeze, gravel, wet painted turn arrows.

When freeways become unsafe is when the loose nut behind the handlebars decides to wick it up and just "go around all of these big slow things". But that's not the freeways fault.

First year/10,000 miles is the hardest. But the foundational rules apply: Wear the gear, slow down, don't ride impaired (drunk, high, tired...).

Lightning strikes, it sucks. But, anecdotally, my worst motor vehicle injury was while a passenger in a modern car when my friend drove into a left turning vehicle. "Fender bender", "no biggie". Chronic, notable, back pain ever since. Worst than anything I've ever suffered on a motorcycle.

Something akin to what the CH376 does to make it easy to attach DOS based USB storage, but something that goes further. Like easy to be a generic USB host rather than something dedicated like the CH376 is.

Something that gives you an 8-bit bus to SPI and I2C and Ethernet/WiFi etc. SPI is trivial, but bit banging it with an 8-bit CPU is glacial. UARTs are faster.

A regular RPi would work, just that the idea of having to boot Linux on my "I/O processor" makes me itch. I'm sure you can go bare metal.

And, sure "what's the point", but I just view the I/O Super Co-processor in the same vein as a SCSI controller chip. Simple protocol to the chip, and the chip does the heavy lifting of the actual SCSI bus.

This chip does more heavy lifting.

I learned SQL 30 years ago and, well, pretty much stopped.

Through the years, as we added ORMs and were using the databases more for base dumb storage, and that I ventured away from report writing, focuses more and just services, workflow and CRUD, I never really learned modern SQL. I've just been able to muddle through with the SQL I learned long ago.

To the articles other point, I've been doing Java for almost 30 years, and while we have a much more modern language, the fundamentals of years ago are still sound and used every day.

Obviously it does not have the tactile feedback of the original. But it’s a far cry from using on a desktop with a mouse.

Using a REPL as a replacement does not mimic the experience, I don’t think. Not for me at least.

Mind, I’m talking a generic REPL. Like a CL REPL or similar, obviously not some custom calculator REPL.

First off, you’re missing the stack, which is significant. CL can almost mimic this with , *, and *. But while it provides a free, handy value store, it’s not the same. You’d end up with contrivances like:

  (* * **)

So, for me, a calculator and its hand held form factor, especially something like the high end HPs, go hand in hand.

No doubt someone could (and likely has) code up a dedicated calculating experience, but a generic REPL I find to be unsuccessful in that role.

But, originally wasn't it mostly a network system to support network printers and file systems?

BTRIEVE would run on top of that. But, as I understand it, Netware wasn't required. They just went together really well.

Finally, especially with Netware 386, they supported "NLMs". "Netware Loadable Modules". This was what let you deploy applications to the network server. Some databases ported to that I believe. I think Informix had a NLM version of Informix OnLine.

So, to me, early Netware seemed more an interesting network utility more so than what I, at least, would consider an "OS". Perhaps it was an OS, but just sealed off. At least until NLMs arrived, making the system more extensible.

I have no idea what facilities were available to NLMs, or how they were developed.

Keypoint:

  > would require a digital game operator to communicate specified information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of a digital game 60 days before the operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, and, beginning on the date an operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, require the operator to provide the purchaser with an alternate version of, a patch or update to, or a refund for, the game,

"Here's your $0 back, thanks for playing!"

That makes it a bit tricky for games like WoW that charge for expansions, as well as subscription. But I'm sure MS can figure something out.

  Dave: But movies cost millions of dollars to make.
  Robert K. Bowfinger: That's after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash, every movie cost $2,184.

Also, there's simply the reminiscing back to the era when these were out. When they were NEW, and revolutionary.

All things that cannot be conveyed from a static screenshot.

Consider NeXTStep. Something you cannot see from these images are that when you moved a window on NS, the entire window moved. Not a frame, the entire thing. This was not normal in the day. Or that NS used Display PostScript. "Not only are they moving the entire window, they're using DPS to do it!" PostScript was powerful, and expensive, and for printers. Yet, here it was.

Or how fast BeOS was, and its cool filesystem, and other aspects.

It's certainly an interesting question to ask folks that have opinions simply on the cosmetics of the various images that we see here, but appreciate that for the folks that "were there", at least for me, I'm not just remembering what it looked like, it's much more than that.

I will never forget when the Mac first came out, my friend and I went to see one at a computer store. And my friend just sat there, mouth agape, moving the mouse back and forth across the menubar, seeing them popup and popdown as it moved, and just going "Woooowwww".

You can't really get it from these screenshots, but I'll give an example of what you're talking about.

I remember GEM when it came out, and it simply looked terrible. Not just their color choice, but simply that low resolution display there were stuck with in the day. It looked cheap, and like a toy. Specifically in contrast to the Mac, which, while it was a smaller monitor, and even lower pixel count, the overall display was crisper, and cleaner, brighter, better contrast.

The Amiga suffered similarly. Big and blocky and fuzzy.

Also, don't forget that the NeXT computers were striving for being "3M" computers. "3M" for 1M pixels, 1 MIPS, and "1 Megapenny" ($10,000). Definitely a different class of machines to OTS PCs of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

The typical troubleshooting path with the b-tree system almost inevitably, and very quickly, led to a "rebuild the indexes" process which no one enjoyed.

The transactions on the SQL system pretty much eliminated that error path completely. Only actual on disk file corruption would lead to trouble. We could always (and did) post wrong data to the DB, but the DB did what it was told (right or wrong), but having the indexes lose sync with the as records was never a problem.

Its hard to describe how refreshing that was.

I'm sure there were b-tree systems with in built transaction systems to keep the base rows in sync with the indexes, but they were pretty late to the game and the SQL DBs started taking over.