Agreed, entirely. I adored my original Zune, as far as a piece of hardware, it was amazing. Cool look, big color screen, heck even an FM tuner. It was ahead of its time. The software on the other hand still gives me nightmares. It crashed all the time, would constantly lose large chunks of metadata I had meticulously entered, would randomly freeze while loading music... it was the weak link in the Zune chain.
I'm unclear, is this professional wrestling (staged and heavily choreographed) or is this more akin to MMA, where the bouts are not predetermined and the fighting is "for real"?
Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.
A smaller ISP near me (Bright House) does a similar thing with their hotspots. There are no ad injections, but they inject a little popup with their logo, that says something along the lines of "hotspot provided by Bright House networks".
The funny thing is, this network requires you to log in with your Bright House username and password, so anyone seeing that little "provided by" intrusion is already a paying customer.
What led you to using No$, and not having an official dev kit? I have no idea what the relationship would have been like with Nintendo...but did they wonder how you'd written the game if they'd never issued an official dev kit?
Oh, interesting! For those of you not versed in the intricacies of playground GBA link cable gaming, this protocol was used to link multiple GBAs, where one would have a cartridge and the others would not, and they would receive the game over the link cable. These single-cart multiplayer experiences were almost always very rudimentary, because as Torgo says, you're loading the entire payload in memory.
It would be interesting for the author to get a flashcart, load his rom on it, and add some video of it playing on physical GBA hardware. Then you can really find out if any quirks of the system would prevent it from running, or add any slowdown.
(The terminal would be the only place it would display correctly it seems, but it would be nice to see the chaos it may or may not cause in Github and other tools.)
Finding someone who can write very technically while also being funny and charismatic is pretty rare (We computer types aren't always the biggest hits at parties). I also really appreciate his "last time on" opening paragraphs... it gives some context to the blog post and where's coming from in his headspace. Neat.
I'll second the use of Liquibase. Writing changeSets is simple, and it's very easy to bring a developer's fresh database up to speed by simply letting Liquibase apply all the changeSets in order.
We've found that maintaining a separate "changelog" file for each major release that collects the history of changes for that release and subsequent minor releases is easiest. We also use the Jira ticket # associated with a schema change as the ID of a changeSet, so we can tie changes to feature requests, bug reports, etc.
Interesting. What do you think is vague about the five star system? Or is it any rating system that would be "garbage-in"?
Being interested in video games, I've thought a lot about rating systems. Older magazines used to use 10 (or even 100) point scales, and you quickly realize all the rating ends up taking place in the top 30-40 percent of your scale anyway... so why not limit the gradations. For my money, 5 stars makes sense... you've got a middle of the road "average" 3 star movie, and then two stars above and below.
I think most of the problems with distraction the author points out would be better phrased as over-connectivity. Knowing you are holding the window to the internet, all possible entertainment, and all your friends literally in your pocket makes it very difficult to not be constantly engaged.
Over the last several years, I've drifted farther and farther away from Facebook, without really replacing it with anything in my life (aside from closer, more meaningful, more personal relationships). That twitch instinct to constantly check Facebook is now gone, and instead of feeling disconnected by pulling away from my social network, I actually feel closer to my friends and loved ones, because I now have to connect with them one one one, and have real conversations, instead of passively absorbing their lives.