the_mat

6 ms·

1.
by the_mat 13y ago
It's easy to forget that the SNES game library was mostly a sewer filled with "character with attitude" platformers. Loads of really, tremendously bad, unoriginal stuff
2.
by the_mat 13y ago
I suspect you're right, though I'm hoping it was done unintentionally, that he hired a company or acquaintance to "promote" the game, and it resulted in bot-fueled reviews and downloads. The smoking gun is that he had tw
3.
by the_mat 13y ago
Think about the CPU landscape in 1984. You had all these 8-bit home computers running at sub-2MHz. The IBM PC was 16-bits running at 4.77MHz, and most of those were actually using 8-bit buses (the 8088 vs. 8086). The super expensive IBM PC&
4.
Hartmann Pipeline(en.wikipedia.org)
6 points by the_mat 13y ago|1 comments
5.
The Silent Majority of Experts(prog21.dadgum.com)
131 points by the_mat 13y ago|37 comments
6.
Sympathy for Students in Beginning Programming Classes(prog21.dadgum.com)
1 points by the_mat 13y ago|0 comments
7.
by the_mat 13y ago
I felt the same way about Wolfenstein 3D. The graphics were neat, but the game was a big step back from its 2D namesake on 8-bit hardware. It was just run and shoot and rub along walls hoping for a secret panel. I never understood why so ma
8.
by the_mat 13y ago
This is the end for id. The only thing id has had going for it are Carmack's engines. In recent years his stuff has been as amazing as ever, but so many commercial engines are only a fraction of a step behind, and the difference hardly
9.
by the_mat 13y ago
Was that cut and pasted from some kind of template for empty, verbose corporate-speak?
10.
A History of Shareware (1999)(loonygames.com)
9 points by the_mat 14y ago|0 comments
11.
by the_mat 14y ago
The "it feels so much faster" comments don't fly with me. The iPhone 4 still feels slick and speedy in September 2012. The 4S was faster, but it wasn't noticeable except for certain apps. Now the 5 is 2x faster again, but it's how much CPU
12.
by the_mat 14y ago
Can you imagine the pain caused by transitioning away from HFS+? Is there something so fundamentally wrong with it to justify all the compatibility headaches of a new filesystem? Under the hood, there's some low-hanging fruit that I'm surpr
13.
by the_mat 14y ago
You missed a key point: with OpenGL 1.3 you don't need to follow the glBegin/glVertex/glEnd paradigm. You can create a display list or you can use vertex arrays. In fact the reason for including display lists in the first place was to make
14.
by the_mat 14y ago
The main thing Apple did with the iPad was make it work without any major gotchas. Sure, you could have stuck a desktop CPU and desktop OS in a touchscreen device. Other people tried that. It wasn't appealing. The iPad gave long battery lif
15.
by the_mat 14y ago
A good article, thanks for writing it. I'm not convinced that a majority of cyclists understand that they have to follow the same rules as motorized vehicles. It's unusual to see the driver of a car blast through a stop sign without slowing
16.
by the_mat 14y ago
He missed the point of the Instagram logo. The whole purpose of Instagram is to make retro-styled photos, so a retro camera icon makes total sense.
17.
Is higher rez always better?(s349909351.websitehome.co.uk)
1 points by the_mat 14y ago|0 comments
18.
by the_mat 15y ago
Well, let's be fair. OMGPOP is hardly a bastion of game design originality. For example, dinglepop is a 100% complete rip-off of Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move, which Taito released in 1994. There have been countless clones since then, and th
19.
by the_mat 15y ago
This list reads exactly like advice from business books from the 1970s or earlier. And I mean exactly . No deviation. Nothing new. Clearly there's more to the meeting issue or people wouldn't be shouting the same advice into the wind 40+ y
20.
How to Crash Erlang(prog21.dadgum.com)
2 points by the_mat 15y ago|0 comments
21.
by the_mat 15y ago
I'm beginning to wonder if the memory "issue" is psychological. I run OS X Lion on a 2GB notebook. I use Xcode, Python, ImageMagick, Firefox w/Firebug. I've never had noticeable paging issues or felt the desire to upgrade.
22.
Living in the Era of Infinite Computing Power(prog21.dadgum.com)
1 points by the_mat 15y ago|0 comments
23.
by the_mat 15y ago
"most of these sites look stuck in a much older paradigm of thinking about web design" This needs some explanation. The vim site looks dated, but clearly I'm not enough of an insidery web guy to know why some of these sites are stuck in a m
24.
by the_mat 15y ago
I can't see writing text-based Lua scripts on an iPad as anything other than an anachronism.
25.
by the_mat 15y ago
There's a dangerous flip side to this: In my experience just about all programmers want to remove things from code that they don't understand or see the reason for. Why is that weird check there? Who thought it was a good idea to allocate m
26.
by the_mat 15y ago
Many of the comments following that story are deranged, and I mean that in the strongest sense of the word. "Software extremists" like that really exist? There are people who honestly think Steve Jobs was evil? And most disturbingly, there
27.
A Catalog of Common Space Leaks in Haskell Programs (blog.ezyang.com)
2 points by the_mat 15y ago|0 comments
28.
by the_mat 15y ago
To me, there's a dichotomy between the "if it compiles, it usually works" aspect of Haskell (and how this is often touted as superior to the dynamic typing, test-driven approach) and that you can't get a picture of memory usage until you ru
29.
by the_mat 15y ago
Please stop with the toy benchmarks and pretty one-liners that show how awesome Haskell is. There is growing list of smart programmers who get all enchanted with Haskell, jump into it wholeheartedly, and end up frustrated (see bottom of mes
30.
by the_mat 15y ago
Of course, the Zip drive was massively popular. It was the first legitimate, mass-market step past the floppy drive. They sold like crazy, even being standard options from Dell. Zip drives were surpassed by USB drives and cheap hard drives,

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