jcfields

Next week: making a tic-tac-toe game look decent using JavaScript.

The main mistake with the Sega CD was adding a bunch of expensive new hardware to it. It gave the Genesis a second, faster Motorola 68k and a special ASIC to handle sprite scaling and rotation effects (to compete with the SNES), but these inclusions effectively doubled the price of the add-on and were seldom used by developers. The Turbo-Grafx CD, on the other hand, just added a CD-ROM drive to the Turbo and cost half as much. The Turbo CD was also much more necessary since the console used HuCards that were much more limited in space than the cartridge ROMs used by the Genesis.

That said, the Sega CD was reasonably successful for what it was, and I don't think it contributed much to Sega's downfall (if anything, it helped Sega foster an impression with customers of being on the cutting edge of things back then). Far more egregious were the 32X, since it confused customers about the company's direction after the Genesis and was abandoned so quickly, and the Saturn's architecture being so much more expensive and complicated than the PlayStation, especially for 3D games. The cost let Sony undercut them because they knew Sega couldn't match them without losing money on each console, and the complexity was such a hurdle that even Sega's first-party developers had trouble figuring it out (they had to release "do-over" ports of Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA because the first versions were so rushed and buggy). Sega of America also pulled the plug on the Saturn way too early (because of Bernie Stolar's infamous interview where he said the console wasn't the company's future, which caused third parties to immediately cancel their releases for it), which left the company with basically no presence in their biggest market for about two years.

I made a few simple Mac apps in Objective-C during the pandemic in 2020, and I was struck by how hard it was to find tutorials and examples on how to do anything in Objective-C. It's possible I was looking in all the wrong places, but it seems like everyone assumes you're using Swift at this point. I would advise against learning Mac development with Objective-C except to people who have a specific interest in it or need for it. I also think most people accustomed to newer programming languages would probably find it arcane in some areas and tedious in many others (although I personally like it for what it is and don't regret the time I spent with it, I definitely felt like I was making things harder on myself by using it).

What’s so hard to understand about Edge pretending to be Chrome pretending to be Safari, using Blink pretending to be WebKit pretending to be KHTML pretending to be Gecko, all pretending to be Netscape Navigator? I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude.

The article quotes a Stack Overflow post with the conditions under which V8 will optimize the switch statement:

> @LGB actually in V8 (JS engine used by google chrome) you need to jump through a lot of hoops to get switch case optimized: All the cases must be of same type. All the cases must either be string literals or 31-bit signed integer literals. And there must be less than 128 cases. And even after all those hoops, all you get is what you would have gotten with if-elses anyway (I.E. no jump tables or sth like that). True story.

In the case of this emulator, it wasn’t being optimized because it had more than 128 cases.

You can we we advocate for this position in a less snobbish way. It’s times like this I feel like a real idiot for expecting more from this site than the average Reddit trainwreck comment thread.

Guess what, you’re not that much better than everyone who disagrees with you.

"And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away."

The YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown has an "Essence of Linear Algebra" series that I found helpful (along with an Essence of Calculus series and videos on other tricky subjects such as differential equations and Fourier transforms). I found that the visual approach of the videos helped make the concepts more intuitive.

They've actually been warning users since Catalina (if not longer) when the following are run:

python

irb

php --version

tclsh

For PHP, it also shows up in Apache's server string:

Apache/2.4.46 (Unix) PHP/7.3.24-(to be removed in future macOS) mod_perl/2.0.9 Perl/v5.30.2 on hostname

Personally, I've been hoping they'd do this for a while since it's annoying having two versions of each interpreter installed (the system one that can't be updated and the one I installed myself via Mac Ports). Anyone who uses these languages much probably already has a package manager installed. I think they should leave Perl, though, since it's as much as Unix system utility like awk or sed as a programming language.

The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through, reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality, flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements. People put up with it since the articles were largely an excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed this and let people submit things directly. And the quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days, which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).