whoopdedo

> She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future. A third of the things I buy* from eBay come shipped by Amazon. I can't always tell if they were using the warehouse for logistics or the seller is doing arbitrage. Either way, it would seem Amazon isn't bothered by people "voting with their wallet".

(*That are new of course, used and open-box still come from the seller as I expect.)

Do you have data from 2000 to 2004? Not only covering an earlier Republican administration it also captures the last tech bubble.

Let us not forget that the predecessor to VeraCrypt, TrueCrypt, was suddenly discontinued and users were told they should migrate to BitLocker.

There were questions about their motivation at the time. There still are questions.

Look at the subroutine `EnemyMoveGetMaxRowBot` starting at line #9353. On #9414 the data row pointer is set to the enemy's current row. On #9441 it checks if the column to the left is a pole. On #9516 it checks if the column to the right is a pole. Now notice that on #9461 the row pointer is moved to the row below so it can check for a walkable tile (brick or ladder). When the right-side check is done after a left-side check the row pointer will be on the wrong row.

Here it is in C (from my own notes)

    SetCurrentRow1(y);
    if (CURROW1[x] != 0) {
        if (x != 0) {
            if (CURROW1[x-1] == 4) {
                TargetY = y;
                if (y >= PlayerY)
                    return y;
            } else {
                SetCurrentRow1(y+1);
                if (CURROW1[x-1] == 1 || CURROW1[x-1] == 2 || CURROW1[x-1] == 3) {
                    TargetY = y;
                    if (y >= PlayerY)
                        return y;
                }
            }
        }
        if (x < 27) {
            if (CURROW1[x+1] == 4) {
                TargetY = y;
                if (y >= PlayerY)
                    return y;
            } else {
                SetCurrentRow1(y+1);
                if (CURROW1[x+1] == 1 || CURROW1[x+1] == 2 || CURROW1[x+1] == 3) {
                    TargetY = y;
                    if (y >= PlayerY)
                        return y;
                }
            }
        }
    }

The bug can be seen on level 29 if you stand on the left set of blocks that has a single gold in it. The enemies will get stuck on the second ladder which has a pole on the right side.

The Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and naturally the VIC-20 versions of the game have this bug since they were all made by Broderbund. But interestingly so does the Hudson Soft NES port. The later Macintosh version, which is otherwise a direct port of the Apple II code, fixed it. The IBM-PC version didn't have this bug because it was rewritten with the memory layout column-ordered instead of row-ordered. But then introduced a similar bug by subtracting when it should be adding.

(edit: I hadn't checked until just now but I'm amused to find that Lode Runner Legacy from 2017 preserved this bug in the classic game mode.)

> a different set of rules for companies

That is sort of the problem we find ourselves in.

I'd say no. We would have had the Itanium drama 10 years earlier. The i860 had some flashy features in it (integrated graphics, SIMD) but also the same Achilles' heel as Itanium of compiler-directed pipeline ordering. That made it much slower than other processors and any analyst of the time would have recommended staying on x86 for the performance and not having to change all your software. So AMD and Cyrix sell more chips and Intel has to backpedal to avoid completely losing the PC market.

The real echo of history is that Return/Enter is still rename and open/launch is Cmd-O.

The obvious implication being who Amazon considers to be their "customer". Hint, it's not you.

>The public paid for this data.

Someone should file weekly FOIA requests.

I expect there's some selection bias at play. If you're taking a philosophy major in college it's likely you already feel confident in your post-graduation career, so can study things that you like. Whereas if you're in a CS track it's because whether you get a job depends on getting a degree. The student studying philosophy is in school as an alternative to work. The STEM major is in school as a prerequisite to work.

IBM marketed "OS/2 for Windows" which made it sound like a compatibility layer to make Windows behave like OS/2. In truth it was the OS/2 operating system with drivers and conversion tools that made it easier for people who were used to Windows.