mdhughes

joined 11 months ago
[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 weeks ago

How much "video game"? My first was a guess the number game with knights jousting, you got left/right/up/down hints for the point on his shield. This was on TRS-80 Model I, summer 1979.

Actually moving "sprites" (character graphics blocks) around the screen, Jetfire was my space shooter not QUITE like Defender because I had no ground, late 1980?

No copies of either survive, they would've been on cassettes lost/wiped long ago, a few copies of Jetfire were made for others.

I've done a lot more since, of course.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 1 month ago

Went to school before the late '90s: Write everything in paper notebooks & exam books.

Went to school between late '90s-2020s: Tap it all into a computer. Learn nothing.

Went to school late 2020s on: Write in paper notebooks, in between scavenging the ruins for food.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And what happens when you run that on Feb 29, 2024?

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 months ago

His books are also fun, The Stench of Honolulu was good, the opposite of a hard-boiled PI.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 2 months ago

A degree in CS is valueless for actual working jobs. You need to write software and show that you know what you're doing. And if you can do that, you may not even need a job from anyone else. The time when companies would just overstaff and have paid interns is long over.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 months ago

Get an 8-bit computer emulator, and learn 6502 or Z-80 assembly.

Usborne machine-code-for-beginners or any book by Rodnay Zaks.

It gets deeper from there, and modern CPUs are kind of awful to hand-hack assembly on, but you'll at least learn how the computer really works!

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 months ago

I was doing some ST retrocomputing last night, and GEM was just great, so much cleaner and simpler than modern GUIs.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 41 points 4 months ago (3 children)

print( ["even", "odd"][num % 2] )

If you need to avoid evaluating the wrong branch:

print( [lambda: "even", lambda: "odd"][num % 2]() )

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 months ago

I only use nerdtree, and bind some scripts to F-keys. Haven't updated in a couple years, just works.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 6 months ago

Other way around. You punched the edge to make it writeable (or double-punched to write on the back side, if you were brave). Cover it to make it read-only. The 3.5" sliders were the same mechanism, open was write, closed was read-only.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 6 months ago (10 children)

If you write to a text (as opposed to binary) stream, \n produces \n or \r\n (or \r if old enough) depending on platform just fine.

Nobody should be using C++ anyway, but plenty of languages have silly system newline constants, which do nothing useful.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I wonder if he Dremels the case open and explodes the power supply. (no, I don't click his links)

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