yosser's comments

Sort of, but be warned it wont automatically revert a time machine backup of your Tahoe files to a Sequoia system, you have to manually copy them. Similarly you have to recovery boot into disk utility to flatten your hard drive before installing Sequoia from (say) a memory stick.

It all seems a bit needlessly tricky. Frankly though - for me at least - it's worth the trouble.

I've just gone through the rather painful and protracted process of reverting from Tahoe to Sequoia.'Reverting' rather than 'downgrading' since Tahoe is in no sense an upgrade.

I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from the accessibility settings.

Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and interact with. By far the most offensive thing to me is the pointless rounded rectangle thing. It delivers absolutely no value at all to the user and defies any form of justification. How in any form is this a decision designed to improve things for the user?

The other multiple weirdnesses commented on elsewhere while unpleasant are more liveable with, but I honestly never found a single change that improved my interactions with the computer. How on earth can you have spent a whole year on this and why didn't anyone have the authority to pull the plug?

I would no longer recommend a new mac to my anyone. A second hand model running a previous operating system makes far more sense.

I used to live just down the road from Fred Dibnah's house when I was in my early 20's. It was quite an interesting old building with a fairly steeply sloping garden that led down to an old workshop packed with steam engines and similar mechanical bric a brac. Despite the layout you could easily see down to the bottom of the garden from the pavement as you passed by.

I had a sort of standing joke where I would wind my girlfriend up by pointing out that it was Fred Dibnah's place every time we walked past. I did this perhaps a little too often.

One day, she had had enough and told me in a very loud voice that 'she couldn't give a shit if it was Fred Dibnah's house'. That's when I saw his startled face peering up from behind a traction engine. Sorry Fred. I hope you can forgive me from that big old chimney in the sky.

It just cloned a very primitive slack copy for me

https://light-whale-5opfal.manyminiapps.com

Well done guys.

So this guy never ever restarted his car after a short interval except for when he bought vanilla ice cream? Additionally, he never varied the time intervals in the shop when he was buying aforementioned ice cream?

Is it is an understatement to suggest this is a highly unlikely circumstance?

Isn't this a red herrring? I thought the law didn't require the removal of E2E encryption, but rather mandated the addition of a back door that submits some kind of meta data summary to a third party service?

I'm 62. I started out by coding basic and machine code on a ZX-81 I won in a competition when I was on the dole in the early 1980's.

These days I earn a handsome salary as a front end developer - mostly React, but other frameworks as and when required. I pull in very good side income as a freelancer too. Over the last 15 years I have had absolutely no problem getting a job at any stage, usually winding up with a number of offers within a few days of leaving my previous job.

I imagine I've come across ageism from time to time, but honestly it has made little difference to me or to my prospects. I'm told I look quite young for my age, but I dye no hairs.

Take heart oldies, if I can do it, so can you.

Usually a simple 6502 assembler, debugger combination with an integrated editor on a dedicated PC, hooked up a cable into some kind of magic box on the target NES. In the UK at least a system called PDS was popular though it wasn't uncommon for development houses to have custom written development environments.

At that time, if you were lucky, you'd have a 20Mbyte hard drive on the PC and 600k or so of Ram.

In our case we had written a few custom graphics tools but in the main graphics were either hand drawn onto graph paper, or drawn in deluxe paint on the Amiga.

Some of the Japanese companies had very peculiar rules.I know of one well known company who kept their programmers and artists in entirely separate offices. Artists would burn their finished graphics onto an eeprom and the poor programmers would simply be presented with the rom images to do what they could with.

Ah yes, in retrospect I think the NES was refreshing at 25/30 times a second, so double that for the number of scroll register updates we needed to make.

It's been a long time!

One of the trickier things to manage on a NES (without additional hardware on the cartridge) was maintaining a static information panel on the bottom of the display - for the score and so forth - while the portion of the display devoted to gameplay scrolled freely around both vertically and horizontally.

The trick we used at Zippo (Wizard and Warriors II and 3, Solar Jetman etc.) a trick given to us by Rare, was to change the scroll registers and I think the character look up location at the moment the screen refresh cycle reached the appropriate point on the display. These registers would then need to be reset during the vertical blanking interval. So all in all either 100 or 120 times a second depending on the TV system.

Since we couldn't afford to keep the CPU hanging around doing nothing while we waited for the cathode ray tube gun to hit the right point on the screen the trick was a two parter.

First you would get the sound chip - such as it was - to play an inaudible sample of a determined length which would then trigger a CPU interrupt at more or less the right time, within say two or three scanlines of the position of our static panel. You would then position a spare sprite on top of a visible pixel at precisely the right point on the screen so that when it flipped its hardware collision detection bit this was precisely the right time to switch the scroll registers etc.

These were the kinds of shenanigans that made programming the NES intricate and time consuming, and also in later years I suspect made the job of emulator writers something of a misery.

Of course Microsoft bought Rare Ltd., so I guess they thought they might as well acquire some Nintendoish IP one way or another.

No, it's a javascript error. The second time around I agreed to the terms and conditions and then the site worked fine.

It's still all indexed by google. For example; all you need to do is search for a unique seeming piece of text from your dreamwiki gem, and the site will appear on the first page of googles' results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT&o...

I programmed Feud, my first Amiga game. I always wondered if anyone would find Ste Pickfords' message (hidden behind a bridge IIRC). It's nice to see that 30 years later, yes someone has.

Ironically, that's precisely how a lot of old Z80 and 6502 programs managed conditional execution. We used to call it a 'jump table'.