elweston2 · HackerTrans

When the dude is walking across a 3 way 45MPH in each direction street in a low light situation. Then 1 block away was a well lit cross walk. Yeah he gets the horn. Sorry if I did not make that clear. Did not think I had to... Oh that happened to me just last week. Although I am not sure why you think it is OK for that 1 dude to hold up about 40 other people.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

It varies from state to state and city to city. Some have the very regulation you are talking about. I have never seen it enforced.

In your case if there was no indicator light. Then you could go for it when the traffic was going in the same direction as you or when clear from the other direction.

The general rule of thumb is from any corner you can cross. That does not mean you get to stop traffic to do so. Though it seems much more common now for people to just cross wherever they want in the area I live in. They seem surprised when I honk at them. It shakes them out of them looking down at their phone while randomly walking around. You may have 'right of way' but the driver does not always see you in time. Be safe.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Anyone who can say with certainty what the market is going to do is usually selling you something. Especially, when they trot out a magic number that predicts something. The division you are noticing has been there for a long time (100+ years).

Will there be a recession? Yeah. When, is the trick, it could be tomorrow or 10+ years from now. That recession will also be followed by a boom. Such is life. That we have not had one recently is a bit unusual but not unprecedented. You could even argue the the world is already in the 'coming' recession, minus the US.

I would posit people wanting a recession is just a form of jealously and resentment. Normal? Not in my experience. But then I may have just not noticed. I remember the gas lines of the 70s. No one really wants that just to feel smug, do they?

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

My issues is it is that data 'elsewhere' bit that they want. Even when I pay they want to harvest my data. Most of the time it is to do the opposite of what the main article is talking about.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

I am becoming more and more convinced that keeping my data and programs on other peoples computers is not a good idea. They can not seem to resist the idea of 'harvesting' information from me to 'monetize' me for a small monthly fee. The PC revolution is over. The smartphone killed it.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

I am not on reddit. But I do read it a lot. I usually spend a couple of years before I make yet another account somewhere. Because most of the time other people have made my point and I do not have anything to add. At this point it has saved me many security breaches. As at some point the company almost always loses control of its password database for some reason.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Most of that effort to archive games is not IA. It is from 2 other groups who sometimes work with IA if they all are not fighting. Specifically one group is the one going through all of them and configuring them to work correctly in DOSBox. Another is just going through and just cataloging them. Getting the metadata on that stuff is kind of tough now. Like what was the exact date a game came out on? Does it have artwork still? Is there some odd protection scheme going on? Is there an IMG file for the disks? Or is it just some random pile of files? Can you get a copy from ebay? etc etc etc. IA typically notes who is doing the archive work. IA also respects takedown notices for these games. As many of them sort of came back from the dead and are sold again, or the company just does not want its IP on some random site. A good portion though no one really knows who owns them anymore. Some have clear lineage. Some have been sold over and over to random companies and depending on contracts no one knows.

That 'scene' is also full of drama and very insular. Donate to IA to help them build better infrastructure and better search. But donating because they host old abandoned DOS games I would not call a good reason, and misplaced. Because the people doing the majority of the work are doing it because they like it, not money. IA does have some work around that such as getting dosbox and mame running in a browser. Just be clear on what you are donating to.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Remember one of the goals was 'just works' too. As they wanted to move people off win3x. The win3x apps had to work/look the same but pick up some of the nice styling from win9x. Some programs would also roll their own system menu and put it in that spot. That would cause a cover up of the close. For a run of the mill application it was just a style and they could have put it anywhere. For programs that controlled the whole window including the title bar area it was a tough choice. Even then it did not always come out looking right. The win95 style guide basically told everyone to knock it off and let windows control it.

Was it all a good choice? For some it was annoying. There was a shortcut that did the same thing. If you double clicked the upper left it would close the window too. Which is how they taught people to use win3x. Most certainly it was an interesting compromise to the constraints they had.

Copying the style was all on everyone else though. They wanted it to be familiar to windows users. All to 'gain market-share' I guess.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

It was annoying. The problem they had was the upper left already had a control there. The system menu. In some programs it is still 'there' but hidden. You can see it if you left click on the upper left corner. They could not get rid of it as some old win3x programs went trolling around in that menu and changed it.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Oh I agree. It is just that +C bit. What happens when your O(nLog(n)) basically just trashes the cache because of your data structures? Yet maybe something 'worse' would run better because of the way cache works? That +c bit can sometimes turn into its own big O. It is a nasty little gotcha when it does happen.

It is a good framework to get you in the ballpark of the correct thing. Even usually 99% of the time it is right. But sometimes the arch bites back due to your data.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

The problem with most economic models is they all work great. In the moment. Right up until it is 10 seconds later and something changed. Then they don't.

However, over time they have hidden variables that no one knows how to measure. Say to day you are in a bad mood. You go to a store pick up an item and go 'nah not going to buy that'. Then tomorrow you are in a good mood. You go to the same store and buy that item. Your neighbor does the same thing but does not buy it at all. Economics is very bad at figuring out what that even meant. But to know if handing people cash, or taxing more/less, or changing policies you kind of need to know what it did mean. Experimenting is a good idea which we have been doing for a long time. But the models still do not match.

The other issue is many of these things are huge systems (macro economics). You can change one little thing and it has an effect on 3 other things that you did not want. To use the classic micro economic model. The pizza joint. I raise my price because (MR=MC). I sell less pizzas but my profit is up. Profit does not come from nowhere. My customers paid more. So they can buy less of something else. I bought less items from my wholesalers so their profit is down. The gov gets more money because of taxes. One little change touched dozens of other stores/governments/people not even related to me. Getting that model right is tricky with thousands of hidden variables that more like functions.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

The way I usually follow it is 1) Is this OK? For example It is only called once in the code in an error path? 2) Did I do something silly? For example, I left in some extra debug code. 3) is the code doing something silly? For example extra work, dragging in extra data that is not needed? 4) is the code written in a way that causes extra work, re-init on inner loop, loop hoisting, etc 5) Is there a better algorithm for this? Binary search vs linear? 6) is the code doing too many things at once. De-serialize it re-serialize it 7) Is there a better abstraction for this? Monolith code vs microservice? 8) Is there any compiler switches that are 'easy' wins? Packing, -O2, etc? Usually not. 9) What sort of memory arch does this machine have? It varies between machines even for the x86 world. For example if I rearrange my memory structures do I use less cache and emit less code. The cache line on this box is x bytes and on that box is y bytes. Some languages do not lend themselves well to this one due to the way their VM/ISA is written. 10) is there some asm that would help? usually not.

Usually 1-7 are all you need. If you get all the way to 10 you are in the deep end for most things.

Big O is good for many things. But in reality big O is O(N)+C where the C can get you. That is where the later steps help. But usually you can totally ignore it. Most of the big wins I get are just from flipping out a bad search for a O(log(n)) search, or removing 'extra' code.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Plus the OTHER 32k they have saved. Over 30 years that is an extra 50,000.

You could save it for 15 and have 37k (7k interest)after 15 years. Or 0. You could save it for 30 and have 126k (54k interest) after 30 years. Or 0.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Would probably depend on the drive. There were utils out there in DOS land that let you format higher than normal. Usually by playing with the sector/track sizes. But it depended on the drive to let you do it. The best I ever got was ~1.6 out of my drives/media.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

COM was not really well designed to be consumed from C++ that is why it felt horrible to you. It was designed for visual basic and Office. If I never see another VARIANT I will be soooo happy. ATL made COM better to use but not much. In visual basic a COM object was dead easy to make and manage. In C++ it came with a bunch of baggage of extra API's to fiddle with and no real clear direction how/why to do so.

I do not know what MS would recommend these days. From my point of view they basically functionally abandoned it but dragged it along because most of their stuff was built with it. The .NET libs was where all the new stuff was going (WPF, WinUI). WTL may be worth a look it looks like it comes out of the ATL/MFC lineage.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

MFC was built for a reason. To provide that doc/view/OLE GUI. If you wander too far away from that it becomes well, lets just say, 'interesting' to use. I would many times just include MFC just to get some of those helper classes though. CString was way ahead of the game. C++ did not get a std::string standard that most people could use until well into the 2000s. Its database classes were good in a pinch to abstract away the nitpicky junk in ODBC. Then C++ took a 15 year sideways journey into getting templates right. During that time MS created C# and basically took away any reasons to really use MFC and C++ on windows for business applications.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

His books on x86 assembly helped me out a bunch too.

elweston2

7 anni fadiscuss

Another is eat your own dogfood. If you enforce rules on others, enforce them on yourself. One project I keep an eye on and gave up trying to contribute to has users who berate others for something then turn around and do the same thing. If you make everyone else do code reviews. You do them too. If you want some sort of special spacing. Make the tools do it. Do not enforce them in code reviews. Teach the users how to setup the tools. Make a FAQ that shows how. Point people at it. You know where everything is, they dont.

Another pitfall I see is what I call 'claiming with neglect' where a user will claim something then let no one else touch it, usually in a pull request that someone put a bunch of time into. But then not do what they said they were going to do. Two years later the pull request dies on the vine and nothing changes. The person who made the request usually just wanders off due to lack of feedback.

Another is letting pull requests sit for years. Just set a max timeframe. If it does not go in that time close it. Do leave the person hanging. I get that happens on a dead project. But on a project that is obviously active? Give that pull request some love. Close it, tweak it, or merge it (something!).

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