CygWin is a damn nightmare, especially if you have other software that uses it.

It suffers from enormous "DLL Hell" problems when it has multiple versions trying to load and if you use programs that use older versions of Cygwin, they don't necessarily run at all in co-existence with programs using newer versions. "Cygwin1.dll" exists is so many different versions that it's almost impossible to manage properly.

I used to develop on Windows with Eclipse and Cygwin. I quickly moved to MinGW because silly things like random games, utilities, etc. that use it would interfere with the version I was developing against.

If all you want is a real terminal on a GUI, Cygwin is total overkill. Not only that, if you use WinSCP as well, it will manage the keys for you properly between both programs so you don't even notice that you're using it.

Use *nix, or use Windows and PuTTY. For sure, as a network admin, I wouldn't let put Cygwin near your computers but I'll happily pre-install PuTTY for you (zero install needed, certainly no pissing about with PATH and multiple versions of the DLL etc.).

Any sort of COM port access.
Any sort of SSH access.
Any sort of SSH tunnelling access.

I work in IT, PuTTY is one of the first things I install in every workplace - not "just because" but I'll be damned if I'm going to SSH into a remote server's management module without it or try to use some junky HTTP/Java monstrosity to achieve what one command can achieve on the CLI.

Hell, I've diagnosed mail servers using it by telnetting to the mail port and issuing commands direct for a setting that some Exchange "experts" denied would ever affect anything - when you can show them the entire mail transaction live rather than some convoluted log that purports to tell you everything that happens on the email sending with a junky bounce error, it kinda hurts.

Sure, a lot of stuff is HTTP-managed nowadays but wait until Chrome removes Java and see if the other browsers follow suit. Because then you'll be back on the CLI quite quickly.

The last Cisco switch I installed came only with some absolutely worthless piece of software that only works if you have version X of IE etc. But SSH was a one-tick enable and I could do everything else from there.

EVERY single "police" recommendation/story I read about how criminals are now doing X and we should be on the lookout for it? Utter bullshit.

Criminals are "marking" houses with little signs to indicate whether they have things of value. No. They're not.

Criminals are knocking on your door to see if you have a dog they can steal. No. They're not.

Criminals are trawling Facebook to see when you're on holiday. No. They're not. (And if you have the vaguest sense of privacy, they wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

Criminals are flying drones to see if you have anything worth nicking. No. They're not.

It's not that they aren't that sophisticated, that they couldn't do this, that there has never been a recorded instance of it, but that they - generally speaking - ARE NOT DOING THESE THINGS.

What can you see from flying a drone that will change your mind from "Oh, well, I was in two minds about this house" to "Let's rob it" (or, indeed, vice versa)?. Virtually nothing. Do you park a Lamboughini at the back of your rotten cheap house and never take it out? Unlikely. Do you keep hordes of rabid dogs that are otherwise undetectable? No.

Live your lives people. Take sensible precautions. Lock your door. Put an alarm on (and don't bother about it making lots of noise if nobody is going to care - better a silent alarm to your smartphone than something disturbing the neighbours so much that they smash it off the wall or don't care about it). And don't leave big expensive things on show.

Generally speaking, criminals are opportunists and don't care about your property anyway. If they see an open door, they'll go through it (have had this happen to me in a previous house while I was behind the open front-door doing some repairs - some guy walked past into my house and started looking around. "*cough* Can I help you, mate?" and he (thankfully) ran a mile.). If they want to burgle you, they won't wait until your smart meter reads the energy usage as low, they'll just ring the doorbell and if there's no answer, they'll force or smash their way in. Even if there's nothing worth nicking (very unusual in any house), they're in by that point so they will find something.

"Casing the joint" is for high-level planned burglaries that rarely happen outside of extremely affluent areas and they can afford their own security anyway.

Like all these things, it's rubbish.

If at any point he mentioned that you would be bound by it, then not reading it and not signing it are your problem.

Sure, signing it makes things easier to prove in court, but that's about it. However, if they can prove that your only valid assignment of copyright is reliant on you having agreed to the licence, then it really doesn't matter and it just comes under whether it's a binding contract or not.

Pretty much, those things tend to be unless they are incredibly unreasonable.

They agreed to the EULA.

In the same way if you buy a DVD, copy it and then "demand a refund" you're only entitled to one if the product was faulty (and then only through defective materials or workmanship, etc.).

The EULA is a legal contract on how both sides behave. They let you use their copyright works. You have to abide by non-cheating conditions and not redistribute it, etc. to stay within that contract.

You can disagree as much as you like, but a court will laugh in your face.

"Hey, I entered into a contract to borrow this guy's car after signing to say I'd not take it on the motorway. I did, and now he's revoking the contract." Er... yeah. Of course.

I agree... the arcade machines are for nostalgia only. The games are able to be played better and more conveniently on any modern display and computer. Sure, you can rig up some "arcade" controls, but again, that's just nostalgia - few things are played better on a joystick than other controls, and those that are tend to be things you buy specialist joysticks for even on PC (flight sims etc.).

The arcade cabinets are big, clumsy, expensive, not very comfortable, have room for HUGE CRT displays but you wouldn't use one nowadays, etc. They are the vandal-proof box that such games had to come packaged in to survive in such an environment with such primitive electronics.

I was a massive arcade fan, but the arcade era is dead because of the economics - paying for games that are no better than those you own at home is pointless. even the force feedback, interaction etc. aren't interesting to the kids today and kids fund arcades.

Given the wording, that sounds like they're going to have to contact either every contributor for copyright re-attribution, or rewrite their code for them.

It's the same problem as appears in kernel GPL 2 vs GPL 3 arguments - it's moot at the end of the day unless someone contacts every copyright holder and gets them to agree, or rewrite whatever code of theirs is still active in the codebase.

And MAME's such a big and worldwide project that there's bound to be dead contributors, and lots of uncontactable ones too - given the history.

Assembly is not difficult.

And nobody creates chips from scratch any more, but the underlying electronics is still worth learning. If you disagree, go look at the THOUSANDS of Arduino etc. projects. Arduino is a microcontroller, not a processor. It has a pittance of RAM, a pittance of speed (16Mhz?) can't access external memory directly, etc. But the principles behind using it reveal a lot about how the electronics work and the problems associated with them.

Just a digital circuit? Far from it when you have power-issues, trace-length issues, hidden impedances in the circuit, etc.

Assembler is also how you begin to understand what a chip DOES. Sure, we all "know". Sure we do. So how do you do bitwise-add-plus-carry? What CPU flags might be triggered and when? What about the circuit timing? Rising-edge, falling-edge, high, low? What about memory refresh, clock-cycles etc.?

Sure, this stuff is not necessary to OPERATE a computer. Nor to PROGRAM a computer in most languages. But then it does begin to come into how to ENGINEER a computer. There are Arduino projects that push a string of bytes down to a Z80 chip with no onboard RAM (literally, the Arduino acts as a memory emulator). They've been enormously helpful in understanding how integrated circuits work - you can literally manually clock one cycle at a time and interrogate the bus timing, memory access, etc. of the attached Z80 as you go. Hell, it's even generating information useful for anyone making a Z80 emulator, etc. What timing does that undocumented instruction have?

There are levels required for certain things, and there's also what happens in science - understanding of OTHER seemingly-unrelated, or obsolete, or total disparate sciences affects your understanding of everything else you touch.

Understanding assembler doesn't make you a better programmer automatically, but it completes the circle - you know what's happening and so can understand why it happens when your engineers come back and tell you the bus timings aren't as they are on the spec sheet, and you can compensate. It's like being a car mechanic who's never seen a Wankel engine. Sure, maybe you never will. Maybe you'll only ever seen them when tinkering with one you bought on eBay. But the different ideas give you different concepts that you can join together because they are based on two solutions to the same problems.

Nobody sits and does arithmetic any more. And you don't need to be able to do mental arithmetic to be a great mathematician. But the knowledge of such things CAN greatly enhance your understanding - and the speed at which you understand new things. Fermat's Last Theorem was solved because someone linked it to elliptic curves. I bet there were mathematicians the world over who were told to stop wasting their time on a 400-year-old problem because it would never be relevant. Now we've JOINED two areas of mathematics, we understand both more. And the guy who had both mathematics in his head simultaneously understands them better than anyone else.

Assembler is not something you'd branch out the next version of Windows into. Of course not. But if you don't tinker with it, understand it, play with other circuits, write your own bootloader, even, then - sorry - you're not a geek with the interest that I would get on with and who I find best at doing geek jobs.

At the end of the day, some bastard had to write the Windows bootloader in assembler. Then, only a few years ago, someone had to rewrite all their bootloaders to take account of UEFI. And every new architecture needs someone to write a bootstrap in assembler even if it's only ever used to get the compiler up and running.

Saying it's a waste is to completely miss the point of life. To pursue interests to satisfy man's innate curiosity.

Your instructor was as blinkered as you.

And, fuck, if you can't get the hang of assembler, when one instruction rarely does anything more than a single piece of binary arithmetic, and each official instruction is clearly documented as to EVERY side-effect down to individual registers and processor flags, I wouldn't want you near any code of import.

When I was a kid, someone mocked me for learning Pi to 32 decimal places. I'm a mathematician. I'm also a computer geek. I learned it because I was writing a program to compute it using a sum-of-series algorithm and have programmed in my own higher-precision data types and was checking their answer was correct. To 32 decimal places. On a computer that didn't even have IEEE floating-point.

Base knowledge doesn't hurt. And it certainly can help. But if you spend your life thinking that "programming" is about knocking up crappy business programs quickly in Java or Ruby, then you'll never use it.

Get out there and learn some fucking real computing. Maybe you'll never use it. But I'd rather hire a coder who was there in the 80's knocking up their own computers from raw transistors, than one who's sat through your instructor's lectures and just wants to do some "Agile" coding or whatever buzzword is in vogue this week.

A cheap digital watch in a plastic casing.

Waterproof. Shockproof. Not conductive. Can't rot. Can't degrade. Battery might die but will work fine with a new battery. Simple. No moving parts. Flat. Small. Cheap and ubiquitous. Lots of them discarded when the strap breaks or the battery dies. Likely to be left in a container of some kind and thus protected in even landfill.

Orly.

https://developer.apple.com/li...

Strange. Seems their official app guidelines are to supply icons in multiple raster sizes and it picks the best one to use...

"Capable" and "Actually Utilises" are very different things.

P.S. Display PDFs natively just means it has a library to do so. It says nothing about the underlying system. I can display PDF's "natively" on Windows, it's called the Reader app.

Depends on your definition.

To me, art isn't some arty-farty defintion about what the artists "means" or "feels" or whatever junk.

Art is a thing that looks good, and that takes skill to create. By my definition "modern art" isn't art. It's just boxes on a canvas, or soiled beds in a museum, as it takes no skill to create.

I invite you to go to pixeljoint.net, for instance, where the galleries of artwork are FABULOUS - beautiful, genius use of the tools at hand, and not something that just anyone could recreate even if they had a hundred years to do so.

Do you have any clue how fonts render in small (or overlay large) sizes?

It's called font-hinting. Because when you just take a vector and stretch it to the desired pixel size, you often end up with junk not resembling the vector at all.

So font designers then have to go and "hint" the font for specific point-sizes - what's "hinting"? Pixel art, basically, for those font-sizes. They say "put a pixel here" or not depending on what makes it look better at that particular size.

Vectors are not, and never have been the be-all and end-all of graphics. Take a paintbrush-artist using a particular stipple effect - to just encode their strokes as vectors means it won't render at small or very large sizes effectively either. It's just not that simple.

There's a reason that every OS has claimed to have "vector" back-end support and yet - in the end - fix icon sizes and tell you in advance what sizes are standard, etc. Because stretching vectors is not the same.

Additionally, I advise you to go to somewhere like pixeljoint.net and look at their top works in their galleries. Then tell me how you're going to vectorise some of those.

Because it's not a technology, but an art-form?

It's like saying that painting is old-hat and only digital-photography can be done from now on - why would anyone "paint" or "sketch" or "draw"? God, what heathens!

All are still equally prized, skilled and valid and used according to the requirements of a particular project. Sure, we still get digital artists and artworks that are just a computer showing a JPEG, but... come on. It's like saying that now we have MIDI, nobody should pick up a real instrument again - just use the MIDI soundbanks and a computer.

For the same reason that some people still choose to paint rather than photograph.

Pixelated graphics are only a sign of displaying the art at the wrong resolution, not a symptom of the art itself. There's nothing stopping someone doing pixel art in HD, or just running in a slightly lower res.

Give me something that plays great and I'll buy it. The particular decisions they've taken over artwork really are second-place to that.

This is why I like the indie games at the moment. Good ideas and playable games and they've just pulled back the artwork and not spent millions and years on expensive 3D models with perfect texturing.

Associating the graphics with the quality of the games themselves is quite telling - some of the best games I've ever played have sucky graphics. Master of Orion, anyone? Where your "ships" are a strip of pixels 3 high and 5 wide (or thereabouts) as they travel between planets? Who cares?

I'm writing a game at the moment, it'll never be more than hobbyist-level stuff but I can't do the art AT ALL.

I had a guy do it. Mainly because, instead of fancy 3D models and bog-standard textures and copy/paste, they were willing to create pixel art from scratch. Sure, it didn't look "HD", it didn't scale without using HQ3X scalers, etc. but - it took a great deal of skill and was how I wanted the game to look. I don't get why everything has to be "proper" 3D, for decades games just weren't. I don't get why even the 2D games are displayed using 3D models, or rendered from 3D models. And if your chosen art-style is cartoon-y, then pixel art suits it a lot more.

Finding a 2D isometric, pixel-artist is the hardest thing in the world (hint; anyone available?). Nobody seems to want to do it at all. I'm sure it's no harder than picking up Blender and having to create a 3D model but it's not the "in-thing". Seriously, my guy churned out isometric sprites 32-pixel wide by 64-tall in minutes each, using nothing more than MS Paint, which would have taken half-a-day to model and then render in the right view and had to use Blender or similar.

Sure, if you're just after slapping in placeholders or using free models, it might work, but not everything WANTS to be 3D-rendered, shiny with shadows, bump textures, etc. and all the other stuff. I'm trying to make a game in a certain look and that look doesn't involve 3D.

For some reason, it's like every artist in the world has suddenly decided the paintbrush is old hat and we have to use spray-guns instead. Fine, for trying different media, experimentation, the odd artwork, or even your particular specialist niche. But why does EVERYTHING have to be 3D-modelled even when the game isn't 3D?

Similarly, yes, I could have specified an isometric vector game and scaled as appropriate. But, that's not the look I want.

Honestly, I'm so bored of games having to be rendered all in the same way rather than the way that suits the game best. Indie games like Prison Architect and retro-games are my only way to get away from the norm, it seems. Sure, I like GTA5 as much as the next guy, but - for instance - something like Heroes of Might and Magic, I still prefer the old flat-2D versions.