The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...
Is it? Java has changed a lot, but in such a way that it's still easy to mentally map new features to the old ones, provided you have understood the core language. IDEs can even convert your code from old to new and back.
When reading an article written by Bjorn Lomborg, you should also do the effort to read the cited sources. This is not an ad hominem attack, just an observation. Do it and you will see.
Ah, that makes more sense than my theory. It's a weak copy protection method, though, as you can just try and see what happens, and I think they dropped it in M&M3.
A few years ago, I decompiled a good part of the PC version of Might & Magic 1 for fun. According to Wikipedia, it had been released in 1986, although I don't know whether that refers to the PC version or to the original Apple II version.
It is a quite big game: the main executable is 117KB, plus around 50 overlay files of 1.5 KB each for the different dungeons and cities, plus the graphics files. I guess it was even too big for the average PC hardware at that time, or it was a limitation inherited from the original Apple II version: When you want to cast a spell you have to enter the number of the spell from the manual, maybe because there was not enough memory to fit the names of the 94 spells into RAM. Apart from that and the limited graphics and the lack of sound, the internal ruleset is very complete. You have all kind of spells and objects, capabilities, an aging mechanism, shops, etc.. The usual stuff that you also see in today's RPGs.
The modern uninstall.exe that came with it (I bought the game on GOG) was 1.3MB big.
Some of the models contain a rail segment (Märklin etc.). Was he a model train enthousiast and the houses were part of a layout, or did he use the rails just as accessories? Strange that the articles don't say anything about the artist's motivation.
That's funny because I have two objects on my desk for which I know that they use 555s. One is a no-name joystick with "autofire" function from the late 1980's. The other is a mass produced motor controller from the 2000's where the 555 generates the PWM signal for a FET.
I don't know much about app development, but I was curious and downloaded the Albert Heijn apk for ARM64. Inside the apk, the three largest entities are:
- libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously)
- flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.)
- libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think)
There is a 640 KByte json file in the assets that stores an animation in base64 format. Now you know what the CPU and storage resources of your devices are used for nowadays...
I'm curious to know what the problem of Firefox is. For example, the 3d-raytrace-SP benchmark is nearly three times faster on Edge than on Firefox on my i7 laptop. The code of that benchmark is very simple and mostly consists of basic math operations and array accesses. Maybe the canvas operations are particularly slow on Firefox? This seems to be an example that developers should take a look at.