Small world! That's awesome that Aardwolf was part of what helped you get into programming. I hear you on areas, I'm far better at the core game engine than I am coming up with good ideas and story lines for areas and quests.
I don't want to cross the line into "advertising" but this thread is probably mostly done anyway so, we have a Discord now if you want to drop by and say hi without connecting to the game itself.
This article really hit home for me. On Aardwolf MUD we replaced "mobprog" scripting with Lua based progs back in 2007/2008 and it has been the single best change we ever made in 25+ years of our game.
The experiences that area builders have been able to create goes way beyond anything we envisioned - with 40 or so LUA functions integrated into the C codebase and basic access to rooms/objects/players and NPCs from Lua they have been able to make entire sub games.
I couldn't imagine trying to build a full application with Lua, but for this use case, it is perfect.
On Aardwolf (a MUD), Lua is our main scripting language and it is amazing what people who come into the game not knowing how to program have been able to create with it, way beyond anything we envisioned.
It is lightweight when not in use and integrates perfectly with the core C codebase.
If I had to pick one single thing that has had the most impact in our game over the 25 years we have been around it would be moving all of our in-game scripting to Lua.
I'm a paying member of Medium although, due to time constraints, I only really read the articles in the Weekly Digest emails at the weekend.
I have noticed a lot of these articles that just make no sense at all starting to appear in my weekly email to the point that I probably won't renew next year if it stays this way, so it isn't just "nobody reading them".
Reminds me of a situation I encountered with Salesforce code many years ago. Salesforce had a requirement that their test platform had to cover some percentage of the lines of code in the Sandbox before you could deploy something to production.
Our Salesforce implementation consultants had put 500 lines of 'x = 1' into a piece of code to force it to deploy -- and these were people at a top consulting company with a very lucrative hourly rate.
No idea if SFDC still works this way or if this would fly today, this was back in the days when you had to use Flex to integrate anything with the UI.
Mods on WSB are catching a lot of flack for closing a thread asking for alternative brokers (no idea why) and for commenting in another sticky not to go and write bad reviews for the brokers limiting trades.
I fear they are about to get a harsh lesson in what happens when the mob you are leading turns against you.
Everything written in this article would have made perfect sense 5 years ago too, now look at the stock charts over the last 5 years. I don't disagree with it, possibly even want it to be right, but I sure would have hated to hold a short on either of those stocks over the last 5 years.
I bought Quickbooks from Amazon a couple of years ago and what actually showed up was a very clearly burned DVD with "Quickbooks" hand-written on it. Best case was I'd received a pirated version of the software. Worst case is who knows what kind of malware might have been on that DVD. Had no choice but to leave a 1 star review to warn others but that really doesn't help anyone who wants to know if Quickbooks is good software to run a small business on or not.
Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me.
The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.
As someone who does have dual citizenship (UK and USA) and has been a BOA customer for over 20 years, my big question is what happens if you say "yes"? I didn't see this mentioned or discussed yet in the comments so far.
Feels like a fairly immature response to me. Not a Microsoft fan by a long shot but they have really embraced open source these last few years. Give it a chance, see what they do, there will be plenty of time to get out if we don't like what we see.
Zune HD really was a good player. I switched to it after 3 Ipod Nanos in a row had trouble holding a charge about five minutes after the warranty period expired. Cheaper price, longer battery life, better (imo) interface, just poor marketing and hard to beat the Itunes Juggernaut. If you subscribed to the $9.99 a month music service then downloading new music and syncing it to the device was smooth and fast and easy in a way that Itunes still hasn't managed. Like you said, no idea why Microsoft keep creating great products but then suck at selling and marketing them.
There are many devs making plenty maintaining old legacy systems in languages long since considered dead on sites like Stack Overflow. The biggest missing qualifier on that survey is the obvious "developers who are likely to answer a stack overflow survey....", or even use SO at all.
As someone who has been shopping on Amazon since the late 1990s I have recently stopped buying anything branded on there anyway, or at least anything branded where I care about receiving real OEM products. Still a fan overall but one too many knock-off products for me.
After a few years of using Amazon pretty much exclusively for everything then going back to other sites for branded items, I have been pleasantly surprised how much better "all the other" online stores have gotten at fast free shipping and reliable service.
I passed this on to a friend of mine who has been doing virtual currency in online games since the mid 1990s (MUDs) and has been called as an expert witness in the past to defeat some of these "virtual currency" patents.
How can it be the biggest bubble in human history when it peaked around 200bn and had nowhere near that much actual cash pumped into it? Minuscule compared to the dotcom and housing bubbles. A bubble, sure, but biggest ever doesn't make sense.
Are these private apps based on Ethereum or public facing apps? I'm curious at this early stage of the ecosystem what an "Ethereum Developer" does in terms of active projects.
"Why buy something when you can buy more somethings tomorrow":
In anything technology related, this has already been true for a couple of decades now. I can buy a phone, TV, computer, tablet etc today, or I can wait a year and get much more for the same amount of money.
People still buy all of those things because, as others have posted, you reach a point where you just have to or want to upgrade because the alternative is you spend years on old technology endlessly waiting for "just the right time to buy".
This is fantastic, thanks for posting it. I'd forgotten about the Rendezvous Houston concert. The studio version of Rendezvous was also my first ever CD.
I don't want to cross the line into "advertising" but this thread is probably mostly done anyway so, we have a Discord now if you want to drop by and say hi without connecting to the game itself.