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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Imagine the following:

    You actually can stop the time by snapping you fingers, but it stops time for the entire universe, including yourself, with the exception of one single observer on some unimportant planet in the Andromeda galaxy. After 100 years from the POV of that observer, time resumes again.

    Would you even be able to tell?







  • Writing good comments is an art form, and beginner programmers often struggle with it. They know comments mostly from their text books, where the comments explain what is happening to someone who doesn’t yet know programming, and nobody has told them yet that that is not at all a useful commenting style outside of education. So that’s how they use them. It usually ends up making the code harder to read, not easier.

    Later on, programmers will need to learn a few rules about comments, like:

    • Assume that whoever reads your code knows the programming language, the platform and the problem domain at least in general terms. You are not writing a teaching aid, you are writing presumably useful software.
    • Don’t comment the obvious. (Aside from documentation comments for function/method/class signatures)
    • Don’t comment what a line is doing. Instead, write your code, especially names for variables, constants, classes, functions, methods and so on, so that they produce talking code that needs no comments. Reserve the “what” style comments for where that just isn’t possible.
    • Do comment the why. Tell the reader about your intentions and about big-picture issues. If an if-statement is hard to parse, write a corresponding if clause in plain English on top of it.
    • In some cases, comment the “why not”, to keep maintenance programmers from falling in the same trap you already found.



  • Honestly, this should be a bigger discussion, and not limited to just games. If a software company sells a software license for perpetual use to someone, they should not be allowed to use copy protection mechanisms that prevent the licensee from using it in perpetuity.

    If there’s some other technical reason why the software won’t run any more after ten or twenty years, that’s another story. But if they just can’t be bothered to keep running the licensing servers, then they need to bloody well remove the stinking copy protection.



  • Floating Point Unit. The thing that does mathematical operations on floating point numbers. It used come separately from the CPU as an add-on chip, but around the 486 era, manufacturers started integrating it on the same die as the CPU. Of course, as these things go, from the system programmers point of view, there is still no difference between an add-on FPU and an integrated one.

    The one pictured here is an add-on FPU for an Intel 80386 CPU.



  • waigl@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    8 months ago

    About 20 years ago, Microsoft was found guilty and convicted, because they forced their browser on their users, driving out competitors by abusing their de facto monopoly on PC operating systems. These days, they are doing the exact same thing again, just on an even broader base. I don’t even understand how this verdict took so long.