Congrats, you've made a source port that will only cost (quick check) $300/year to actually use, not counting the cost of the Apple device itself and, oh yeah, the MacBook required to connect to the device.

All to recompile code in 64 bit mode because Apple decided that their iDevices - of which none have more than 4GB of RAM ANYWAY, should only run 64 bit code. For some reason.

I'm not sure where you're getting the $300 figure from, seeing as how an Apple Developer license is $99 a year, but even then you can push to your devices for free now - Apple dropped the need for the $99 fee for people not publishing to the App Store a few years ago.

It's true you'll need an Apple device and a Mac to compile these and that's going to limit a number of people but that's just how iOS and tvOS development works. You could always write to Zenimax and ask them to update the ports on the App Store.

I was able to get over some hurdles with the Quake II port by looking at a port someone did to Android. Someone similarly motivated in the other direction could take some of my work on other games and get them running on Android. Thanks to open source licensing everyone can share.

But in any event, I'm aware that the source code nature of these ports will limit the appeal to those inclined to break out an iOS developer toolchain, but nevertheless I had fun doing it and thought I'd share it with others.

I missed this yesterday so probably no one will read thus but anyway...

It's always amusing to see a story like this on Slashdot because it just drives the crowd on here fucking nuts. A largely superior form of listening to music exists and yet people are buying more and more music on an ancient medium.

I'm sure there are people who believe vinyl sounds absolutely better. I used to be one of them. Over the many years since I've been in high school and had that belief I've learned a lot about technology, sound engineering (just a pinch), music mastering, and so forth to realize that the notion that vinyl is better is not an absolute thing at all. It has the potential to sound better in certain circumstances, usually involving an expensive turntable, but overall it mostly just potentially sounds different, not necessarily better.

But for most people, I don't think that's the reason they're buying vinyl. Today, if you're buying physical music in any format you're basically buying a souvenir.

Consider a CD. What's the difference between buying a CD in the store and burning one from MP3 files? Cover art, liner notes, silk screening on the disc and some amount of added audio fidelity. The fidelity is not insignificant but really when you're buying a CD you're buying something you could almost make yourself from downloaded files (regardless of how you got the files).

And that's before you consider the fact that if you're buying a CD you probably also want it on MP3 and you'll have to rip it yourself with an optical drive you're increasingly unlikely to have.

A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself. And there's a decent chance it comes with an MP3 download code. And even if it doesn't, it's a big, huge tangible thing that done correctly can be a work of art. The vinyl can be colored, or using funky patterns, or translucent. It can have things like etched holograms in it, or weird tricks like the ones Jack White pulls where he has alternate intro tracks based on where your needle falls or hidden songs in the space on the label. It's just neat.

Plus digital music has done lots of great things but it's true, digital music devalues music. An album comes out, you listen to it once, you say "cool" and then you hit shuffle on your whole collection and you listen to the songs as they occasionally pop up. Listening to CDs was more atomic - you would tend to listen to one CD in your car over and over, or however many your home or car disc changer could handle. A vinyl record though, that's a commitment. You have to decide you want to listen to pretty much the entire side of an album. If you want to listen to a double album you have to get up and flip or change the record three times. If you want to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack you have to get up or flip the record seven times. This is why a lot of the vinyl that sells well to this day are things like Dark Side of the Moon where it's more album oriented than song/single oriented. And a lot of you reading this probably think this is stupid but a lot of us think it's neat. If vinyl continues to grow in popularity we might see a return to the album oriented rock it popularized.

But yeah if you're buying physical music you're buying a souvenir. And it looks like more and more people figure if they're going to buy music, might as well buy a souvenir. Something with big, cool album art and a tangible experience. The rest of the public is fine with music services like Spotify and Apple Music. So the CDs are leaving stores, the vinyl isn't, and although a small handful of people with breathlessly fight to the death to argue that vinyl is superior in some form or fashion the simple reality is that digital music and streaming services aren't going anywhere.

So let the vinyl weirdos like me have our fun.

An AC on another Slashdot story had a really interesting point:

Here's the thing. When a real problem is being solved, the tech that addresses it is used DESPITE its issues. Like Word Perfect embedded formatting characters you had to manage yourself because WYSIWYG tech didn't actually quite work yet. But office secretaries everywhere were forced to learn that crap because the value of editing a doc and reprinting it was too valuable to pass up.

VR is not like this. No one really uses it to solve a real problem, in any form. And so instead of the tech naturally moving forward by necessity and use, it moves forward by marketing and for research purposes. When it does finally work, it will be used in a few places, but it will never really go mainstream because it isn't solving a mainstream problem. If it were, we'd already be using it and tolerating its issues instead of saying they have to be fixed first.

I would say another example are the original BlackBerry pager devices. They're a sad joke compared to what the mobile phone industry would become after the iPhone and Android phones hit the market but the use case - sending email from anywhere - was so compelling that people used them despite the fact that they were primitive. Heck they got the nick name CrackBerries as a result. Now we have an entire world of people staring at their phones sending messages with any number of devices when they're not playing Fortnite.

The tech maturity argument is valid. The cost concerns are valid. The logistical concerns are valid. But I think the real thing is that at the end of the day, most people don't care a damn thing about VR and even if all of those things get sorted out the number of people who want to strap a thing to their face and be in that world for anything more than a few minutes a couple of times to see what's the big deal is nowhere near where it would need to be to make something like that viable.

And I'm saying this as someone who got a Virtual Boy Emulator using Google Cardboard VR running on the iPhone.

Hope it didn't Vita itself with high development costs.

Reports are that Switch Dev Kits are $500 or less. This is why there's so many indie games on it, like Axiom Verge or Celeste. A bunch of AAA devs took a wait-and-see attitude and when sales took off they started working on Switch games. Meanwhile the indies could afford $500 dev kits and got their less complicated games running on it quickly.

Never had to install a special package to log into my bank.

I have. Back in college if you wanted to access Bank of America you went there and they handed you a handful of floppy diskettes to install software. Seriously. It wasn't too much longer after that that online banking through websites became a thing but up until a certain point in time you were seriously having to physically acquire software

I agree that part of their plan was tracking their users, especially since the CEO bragged about it, but then they had to shut down that part of it when people complained, later calling it a glitch or something.

The other part of it, and I think this is the real key, is that MoviePass got tired of being a small fish in a nonexistent pond and decided to go huge in the hopes of being bought by someone else and having it be their problem. YouTube, for example, was hemorrhaging money because their bandwidth costs were doubling every single month. And then Google bought them and that became Google's problem (which wasn't a problem because Google has no problem getting the bandwidth it wants). I think MoviePass was hoping someone would buy them, either for the data part or to shut them down, and either way the founders cash out and leave.

I do have to say that the thing I despised about MoviePass was that anyone with half a brain could see either they were up to something or they were going to go out of business fast. This would be like paying a $20/month fee and getting a card that will pay for all the gas your car ever needs. Something doesn't add up here. But whenever you'd tell anyone they'd treat you like you were some asshole who wanted to ruin everything. And reading all these people who experienced surge pricing or who couldn't get their app or card to work or who had to photograph ticket stubs like they were submitting some corporate expense report... I'm glad I never signed up or bothered with it. They're going to be dead by the end of the week at this rate.

Well... let's not just brush it off as one single management failure with no precedence.

Note that even the HST was hugely over budget, over time, and was mismanaged as well... so it's not like it's a one-time thing. Instead, it's more common than not.

From its original total cost estimate of about US$400 million, the hubble space telescope cost about US$4.7 billion by the time of its launch. Hubble's cumulative costs were estimated to be about US$10 billion in 2010. It was launched years behind shedule. It had a flawed main mirror. Etc.

So...sure, it provided nice pictures, and was/is a great asset, but let's not sugarcoat the truth: it was over-budget, over-time, and mismanaged as well. You could have built about 3 OWL's with that. And those would have provided better pictures, certainly in the visible spectrum.

That's why the "Just because in e.g. 20 years we can do something much cheaper we should not stop building scientific instruments today." argument doesn't hold up, imho, because it will ALWAYS be cheaper to build them on Earth. It's a given. One knows this in front. It's not about 'not' building scientific instruments; one can build new ones for Earth-based telescopes as well. It's balancing the advantages and deciding where the most bang for the buck is.

And as said, I think in many instances, unless for specific reasons or goals, space-based telescopes will always come out lower in that regard.

Now, I do understand what you're trying to say, and it's one of the reasons why - even though I personally would have liked to see 'normal' pictures - I do think it made the most scientific sense to use JWST for infra-red observations. At least, that's something that can not, or only with great difficulty, be done on Earth. But still, it's hard to argue that it was worth more than 10 billion dollars. And it's also hard to argue that's an exception, in large space projects.

with the money of the HST, one could have build a couple of EEVLT instead. With the money of the JWST, one could have build a couple of OWL's. And if one ever would send up a new teslecope, double as grand as JWST and double as costly, it's a given for the same money one would, once again, be able to build a far more powerful telescope on Earth. Yes, maybe not in the infra-red... but is getting infra-red really worth 20 billion dollars?

As for exposure-times... you could build an OWL on each side of the planet. Also: while exposure time is important for deep field viewing, *aperture* (and thus lightgathering power) is even more important. Meaning: with a much bigger mirror, you can see much more much faster. So one day with a two meter diameter telescope would demand LESS than half a day with a 8 meter telescope, if we're only talking about exposure time.

And sure, space has its advantages, but the point I'm trying to make, they're not all THAT overwhelmingly large anymore, on a lot of fronts. Not to warrant a cost/time loss of billions/years - and certainly not if it's not strictly necessary to do it that way.

Now... true, costs may come down - hopefully that will pan out for SpaceX - but if we're speculating on future technology, one may do it both ways, and what if, in the future, they find a way to capture infra-red waves in sufficient amount on Earth, for instance? Future technology works both ways, after all - adaptive optics, unimaginable only 40 years ago, is the proof of that.

So, while potentially complementary, I think a very stringent look is necessary as for what projects, exactly, a space-telesope is worth the extra effort and money, and to what degree.

For some tings, it's pretty obvious; for instance, if one wants to test out interferometry on a scale larger than the diameter of Earth. For others, it's less obvious or necessary.

Also, they had to remove a scientific instrument to make room for the corrective optics.

There is no doubt it was a kludge, and an expensive one at that. And a completely avoidable one. For the PRIMARY mirror - the main piece of the space-telescope - to be flawed in such an endeavor... you'd either need to be willfully turn a blind eye or be incompetent beyond belief.

Even NASA doesn't go without blame, here. They should have checked it independently, before shipping.

If one doesn't want to fall in the trap of meaningless semantics, one can just say it as it is: it WAS a flawed instrument, indeed. One which they corrected later, but not without paying a penalty, both in cost as in time/science wasted.

That said, they had to remove a scientific instrument to make room for the corrective optics.

The original estimate was officially 1 to 1,2 billion euro's (in 2006 currency). The *original* estimate that is. But we all know how that goes, with large projects. ;-)

That said, let's say it would have been double that amount in reality. It still would mean 4-5 OWL's. Even one OWL would produce better pictures than JWST would ever be able to, let alone 5 with interferometry...

It would have outclassed JWST without any doubt.

(If, I repeat, JWST would have been in the visible wavelength as well, which it isn't, and which makes the comparison now difficult. But overall, the 5 OWLs surely would have delivered vastly more scientific output in total.)

But, well, no crying over spilled milk. I'm sure the JWST will provide us with nice and scientific interesting things too. It's just that, in this thread/debate, if you compare space-telescopes with earth-based telescopes (including cost), it becomes clear the former only make sense in some specific circumstances or for particular goals.

Fair enough. :-)

Are you using ublock? Otherwise I recommend that. It's pretty good, and I have had very few problems with it (false positives included) on any site, thusfar.

"Space telescopes not only have advantage in some wavelengths, but they are critical, since parts of the spectrum are blocked by the atmosphere."

Which was why I said they still had advantages in those area's. ;-)

There needs to be a compelling reason to send a telescope in space that costs 10 times more for 10 times less aperture. Difficulties to get close to the diffraction limit used to be one of those, up until the late 20th century, but this reason has been starkly reduced with the advent of adaptive optics. Specific wavelengths which are difficult to observe (not impossible, however, if you use high altitude airplanes or balloons) would be a clear advantage. Longer uninterupted viewing in *some* directions, another.

The question is, whether it's worth it, and at what price (as a cost-comparison).

I'll repeat once more, that for the cost of the JWST one could have build 10 OWL terrestrial telescopes. And there is no doubt that, however good the JWST may turn out, ten OWLs would have overclassed and blown away almost everything JWST could show us. The scientific output would be an order of magnitude more.

So I don't think, in a reality where budgets are restrained, that there is always a sufficient cost-benefit analysis being done for the 'complementary' aspects you speak of. I would therefor hold my position space-based telescopes are only useful (in a cost-benefit context) in specific circumstances and special fields of endeavor, in certain scientific niches, or with with particular goals in mind - all of which are not, or only with great difficulty, possible with more feasible, cheaper Earth-based telescopes.

Not to take sides, but it was pretty clearly shown at the right of the summary, which is still 'the article', and it even says "Neptune from the VLT and Hubble". A cursory look would have been enough to find it. As I did.

While true it could have been put nicer, you're exaggerating with 'ESP' as well. And in your rebuttal you weren't very nice neither. In the end, he did give you the link for your request, so maybe you should have stayed a bit more polite as well, if you're going to complain about it in the first place.

"The diffraction limit is not due to atmospheric effects. It is a fundamental limit imposed by the aperture of your telescope, which is more or less the size of the primary mirror. + /but with the bigger ones it's hard to achieve the diffraction limit because of atmospheric effects"

Indeed. The larger the aperture, the more the disturbances are visible and noticeable as well. At a certain point, you gain nothing in resolution (though you still gather more light), even with bigger mirrors.

"The very best adaptive optics only get you to Hubble territory. JWST is bigger than Hubble."

Which is about current technology. sjb was arguing that better space-telescopes than hubble can be made (similar to your argument here), but better Earth telescopes can be made than VLT too.

There is little doubt that EELT with new adaptive optics would, once again, best the JWST (if they were going for visible light). Let alone OWL, with a span of 100 meters, if they had gone with that idea - and for only one tenth of the price.

"Interferometry, particularly image-forming interferometry, is probably easier in space."

True. And in addition, you can do it near limitless (in distance), contrary to something on earth, and with far less potential noise. My point of the interferometry was the hypothetical case, of a bang-for-the-bucks comparison between JWST and something like OWL. For the same cost, one would have had 10 OWL's. Each OWL would have already provided better images (in visible light) as what WST would be cable of, and while the latter is on segmented mirror, the OWL's could use interferometry, which would completely overwhelm anything the JWST could muster.

I would agree with the theoretical advantages of space-telescopes - of course, viewed on a aperture-vs-aperture basis (and without calculating costs) - there is little doubt space-telescopes are always going to be better. The point here rather is, that at how things are in reality, Earth-based telescopes have become so good, that the huge extra cost of space-based telescopes is just not warranted, unless in very specific circumstances.

In fact, you see that already with the JWST: there was a reason they used beryllium mirror and went for the infra-red, after all. Scientifically spoken, it was the most sensible to do.

To be clear: I'm not against space-telescopes on themselves. I think they have potential. but unless the cost is starkly reduced to build and put them up there, there is little doubt Earth telescopes are the better choice, *unless* in specific circumstances are with a specific goal in mind. For instance, if one wanted to try out optical interferometry with a a larger diameter than that of the Earth, it would stand to reason that the only way to go would be space. Even at an added cost. Same goes for infra-red and ultra-violet observations, depending on the wavelengths.

For the foreseeable future, though, if you take aperture and cost in consideration, it's clear Earth-based telescopes will continue to trump space-based telescopes in the visible spectrum.