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.

Large companies routinely get short-term loans to meet payroll. As far as I can tell, that was a major reason for the idea that banks were judged too big to fail: if a bunch of banks had all gone under, immediately thereafter a large number of fortune 500 companies would also have gone under because they needed those banks for day-to-day financial obligations.

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.

If someone has access to your password management software, and the ability to test out passwords on it and get "the other" passwords back (real or not), then it's a fraction of a portion of a miniscule slice of a second to test whether that password actually DOES anything.

At worst, it'll make it slightly easier to trigger password attempts logins. But at best, something is still brute-forcing your password-management that holds every password you have.

Camouflage works in real life. It doesn't work against computers that are capable of billions of operations a second and can see if there's something under the camouflage within a microsecond.

If anything, just analysing the response pattern of "give the real password" versus "make up some rubbish to feed this spammer" is enough to tell you stuff about the system as a side-channel attack.

Camouflage works by some forms of secrecy only - someone doesn't know you are there. It does not work by there being a hundred camouflaged tank-like things out on the battlefield, 99 of them made of wood, and advertising that fact. Because when you fire the first shot, they know which one is real.

Poor analogies are the worst thing since unsliced bread.

I do not trust any software with my password. Sorry. Certainly not EVERY password I have - some of my passwords literally only exist as a hashed and salted version, and in my brain.

Nor would I trust a basic user downloading something that claims to hold all their passwords, or to know to only put their "master" password into that app, or to not forget their master password, or to install it on all the devices they have so that losing their phone / laptop doesn't lose all their passwords etc. It's a silly idea.

Compared to just remembering a small handful of passwords, it's just laziness at the cost of the illusion of security. If you can remember one password, you can remember five with a bit of effort. And you still have to generate all those intermediary passwords for every site you go on, every forum you join up to, every account you need, etc. so you don't gain anything in terms of time. Just remember three decent passwords and two really crappy ones (for forums you really don't care about, etc.).

If one is ever compromised, jumble them up. If all are compromised, you have bigger problems but then just memorise five new ones.

Honestly, things like LastPass are BEHIND users not being able to remember passwords. We're literally just getting lazier and losing mental capacity that we've ALWAYS had available. And, at least in my case, I know that there are passwords to things (that signed other things, that generated longer passphrases, etc. on offline machines) that honest ONLY I can possibly ever know. The second you introduce third-party software, that's not true any more.

When I was a child:
My parents used to know the phone numbers of every family member off by heart.

When I was a teenager:
I could recite pi to hundreds of decimals places after creating a program that ran on an Amstrad PCW9256 to calculate it (I had to check the answer!), and I still can just from memory. I memorised an entire Shakespeare sonnet just because I needed to for a drama production. I still know it - word-for-word - to this day.

Since then:
I memorise and use dozens of passwords every year. I have separate "levels" so all the really secure stuff with my bank is one set of passwords and all the dross forums I frequent are another. Even if I forget WHICH password it is from the set, I can get it within a couple of goes because I have them all in my head and know what information the site contains about me and, thus, what "level" of password is required.

I unconsciously pick up other people's passwords when they type them in front of me (and I have to ask them not to).

So I have a great memory? No. My memory is atrocious. I forget to phone everyone, I forget what I was doing several times EVERY single day. My girlfriend honestly thinks I have Alzheimer's because I forget so much throughout the day and she knows I'm not just using it as an excuse. I can't learn her native language as my brain can't hold enough of her language to cope.

If I can memorise a handful of passwords, and the average person only needs 5-10 passwords for EVERYTHING altogether, then there's really no excuse. Hell, most of my passwords are muscle-memory and I have to imagine a keyboard to tell you what they actually are.

We all have the capacity to memorise enough information that a password is not worthy of special measures and software to hold it. It's just that we don't bother to do so, whereas we used to (for phone numbers etc.)