NotAnEngineer's comments

This is the rule, not the exception, among addicts. Every recovery program (12-step or not) emphasizes that drugs are not a drug addict's only problem. Obviously they are a very destructive part of the problem, but every addict who stops using long enough learns that -- surprise! -- they're still a self-centered, fear-driven, manipulative, obsessive person. That stuff doesn't just go away when you stop using; if anything, it flares up in other ways (as you've seen firsthand).

Source: many years clean in NA

> At some point not so long ago, they also threatened to replace Google's search engine with Bing by default.

In iOS 7, Siri (the only search interface Apple cares about) will search Bing by default. Source: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/10/a-wiser-siri-snubs...

(Obligatory: OMG, I'm talking to Paul Lutus!)

Yeah, the Apple II era seems to have been particularly destructive with removing copyright notices in favor of "crack screens" and other drivel. Bleah.

More recently, I've been working on my own Apple II game (really). I'd like to release it fully open source, which makes it particularly challenging to use third-party libraries since open source wasn't really a "thing" when they were written. Some of them (notably old Beagle Bros. disks) have since been explicitly placed in the public domain.

So... I would very much like to have some Electric-Duet-based music and sound effects in my upcoming open source Apple II game. (Yes, I just typed that.) Would you be willing to relicense your amazing player routine under an open source license, or to place it in the public domain? I would, of course, give you full copyright attribution in the scrolling credits screen or wherever you'd like.

Horribly off topic, but what is the current status of the Electric Duet player routine? I read somewhere that you had placed it in the public domain in the 90s, but I can't find any confirmation of that.

This is the most inspiring thing I've read in a long time. There's a lot of chatter on HN about how people became an "expert" in this or that, but for some reason, the way you phrased it really resonated with me. And to see the end result -- holy crap. HTML is complicated.

Coming soon! (But not today.)

An open source game for the Apple II, written in 6502 assembly language. Original music transcribed from public domain scores (played with the 2-tone Electric Duet software). It's been very mind-opening to have to think about every byte of memory, learn bit twiddling tricks, design efficient data structures to fit game data on a 140KB floppy disk, etc.

> Despite that issue, we want our videos streamed in high quality and securely

Based on the previous paragraph (about getting Netflix to almost work on Linux), I'm guessing that the "we" here is consumers of video, not producers or distributors. In which case, no, "we" do not give a rat's ass about whether our videos are streamed "securely."

"We" want to watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it. Content producers insisted on "security" and Netflix chose Silverlight as a short-term technical solution to that problem. No one else wanted it. We just tolerated it.

Thanks!

There's a Cydia app called BrowserChanger that lets you change the default browser (so clicking a link in Mail will open Chrome instead of Safari, for example). Is there a similar app that lets you change the default maps application?