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Comment Re: Slippery slope (Score 1) 270

Ah, so you accept a definition of the practice as 'gaslighting'.

That's very cynical of you. But all that matters to you is the end result. There is no room for discussion. You have it all figured out and there is no reason to engage your opponents. You need only impose your view. It's good we were able to come to an understanding.

Comment Re: Why does Jobs always steal the limelight? (Score 3, Informative) 266

People don't want to hear it today, but Microsoft played a big part in the early growth of the Macintosh. It was a threadbare platform without Microsoft Word and Excel. Excel, in particular, was a Macintosh program for quite awhile before Microsoft had a Windows environment good enough to run it on.

Comment Re: Why does Jobs always steal the limelight? (Score 1) 266

And Apple, especially in the early years, was a Pascal shop. With some Smalltalk and other stuff thrown in there. The whole Apple culture was way too baroque and niche-ridden for anything as utilitarian and clean as C. Apple spent hundreds of millions on failed attempts at a new 'elite-unique' OS before giving up and just buying in NeXT Step, which is based in Unix/C legacy code.

Comment Re:Port it away from Java... (Score 1) 56

Microsoft is already working towards less java visibility. The Windows installer from Microsoft is now an .msi file, and when you install it, it installs and uses it's own embedded Java runtime.

When I noticed this last week (after a disk problem caused me to roll back my Windows install) I uninstalled the troublesome and always nagging-for-updates JVM on my system. If you don't use Java for anything else, you're certainly better off using the embedded runtime.

So any new installer of Minecraft on the Windows platform will not need to know about the JRE at all.

Comment Re:Ask other retro communities (Score 1) 66

BTW, one of the neat things about the BBC Micro is that they shipped with a complete circuit diagram for the main board in the back of the manual.

They provide a small but complete schematic of the C64 in the back of the thick ring-bound manual that came with that system, too.

For that matter, you could buy Technical Reference manuals for the IBM-PC product lines and many of us have them. It has schematics of the mainboard and all the IBM-brand expansion boards, along with commented source code listings for the BIOS and the BIOS extensions on expansion boards.

Providing lots of information about the hardware used to be a priority. Not just for repair, but so that programmers could get right down to the signal paths and I/O scheme.

Comment Re:Replacing capacitors... (Score 1) 66

Solder wick has a lot of uses, though. It's more useful for medium-pitch surface mount rework, where you're trying to remove as much of the solder off the tiny pins. Once you have the solder wicked out of the fillets, the terminals can be popped loose one at a time. I used to pride myself on being able to remove an SO-8 package and be able to put it back on.

For through-hole rework a spring loaded solder sucker is better, or if you're wealthy or for professional work, a powered desoldering tool with a vacuum pump.

Comment Re:Replacing capacitors... (Score 1) 66

Yes. Jumper wires are usually the best method. Connected from a component terminal to component terminal. Best to not put a lot of effort into 'repairing' the original trace. An obvious well anchored jumper wire is better than a little bit of bare wire 'woven' into the trace. There are ''quality standards' for that form of rework.

Back when I was troubleshooting medical device circuit boards that were fallout on a production line, I would sometimes find attempts by operators to 'fake out' the rework when they'd yanked the tube out of a hole. The worst cases were when they tried to disguise the damaged feed-through with a little ring of wire to simulate the pad they'd ripped out. It looks nicer for a visual inspection but if the trace isn't connected to the fake pad there's no electrical circuit, or there's a trace on the other (component) side of the board that's also broken. That is one of the worst kinds of rework/troubleshooting- when someone has mucked it up and tried to hide it from you.

Comment Re:That's because... (Score 0) 311

Well, in later time, Apple encouraged developers to develop iOS 'apps' that are just a bunch of HTML/JS all zipped up into an 'app' container.

Technical detail: The .ipa files that are the apps in your iDevice can be renamed as .zip files and opened. I've done so with a few of the image-rich apps that I acquired back when I used an iOS device and pulled out nicely hierarchical directories full of the useful images and other content that were embedded into an 'app' in the .ipa file. (For instance, there are some nice collections of Kahn Academy videos you can get that way.) You can get the .ipa files out of whatever directory iTunes caches them into when you synch your device to your PC.

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