I'm Irish. Well northern Irish. The Republic Ireland seems a lot richer than when I was growing up in n. Ireland. Ireland is the second biggest exporter of software in the world now. I'm pretty certain the tax paid by both corporations and their well paid staff definitely translate to something for the average Irish man. Even if he thinks it doesn't.
Presumably you were in the USA? We had grey imports in the UK too, but it was prohibitively expensive.
My family was relatively well off, but no way I'd have been able to wangle an expensive import super famicom.
Even worse when the snes did finally arrive we were stuck with pal 50hz squished slow versions, especially noticeable in street fighter 2.
Yep, I was in the US. IIRC, the Super Famicom cost me about $350-$400 at the time. Also had the .jp version of the Neo Geo, which was even more. And the PC Engine and Famicom. I did some tradings between consoles there. We weren't well off but all my job money went into it.
All ports by capcom are good :) which means all console ports (apart from the sega master system port, which is impressive just not by capcom). The Amiga, spectrum etc etc ports were god awful.
Though apparently the super street fighter port on the Amiga is rather decent.
I'd love to read something in depth about the capcom console ports. The snes, magadrive and pc engine ports all look like some minor miracles! I remember an interview with a snes developer at rare were he said sf2 is the most impressive game on the snes. (Think I read that in retro gamer UK mag in the last decade or so).
I’m experiencing the same in New Zealand. In-zone houses for high-performing public schools are more expensive than adjacent houses (I.e. out of zone) by almost exactly the amount of the local private school fees. House price scales with the number of bedrooms in the same way that private school fees scale with the number of children enrolled.
So the question is; is it more beneficial for the children to get the more expensive education or to inherit the more expensive property?
Side note, “public school” here means state-owned and “private” means “owned by private individuals”, which I have heard is the opposite nomenclature to what’s used in the UK?
I'm eternally confused by what an ABI actually is. Especially now that people say the win 32 api is the stable Linux ABI.
Genuine question, what is the difference as they both seem to be conflated.
A library with a stable ABI means that newer releases of that library do not break compatibility with old binaries linked against it. This is why old Windows apps still work on newer OSes.
For example in a typical C library, as long as you don't rename or remove any existing functions/exports (or change their signatures), you can continue to add new ones over time without breaking forwards compatibility (old binaries can link/call into the newer library and still work). This is also important for security reasons and not just application compatibility.
Usually projects will only make ABI-stable changes within minor versions, and leave the breaking changes to major versions where upgrading or recompiling the original application becomes necessary.
For C++ this is more complicated because it's all compiler-dependent (no language-defined ABI), and with classes you typically can't re-arrange anything (like class members) without breaking compatibility.
Thank you.
So windows historically has been careful to ensure that it's abi is stable where as Linux relies more on users recompiling against binaries, which is a problem if you are shipping binaries rather than source code? Presumably package managers try to handle this by ensuring you dependencies are up to date?
Buyim higher density memory is almost always more expensive. Ye, you could buy 100s of the cheapest modules at that price, but ehat is the point if you can only stick 8 of them in any given machine?
I had a desktop PC that I bought (as a pile of bits!) with 512MB of RAM in 1999 and I sure as hell didn't pay more than a couple of hundred for memory. That might have been EDO rather than SDRAM though but I can't see the price difference being that much!
>128MB DIMM: May 1997 $300. July 1998 $150. July 1999 $99. September 1999 Jiji earthquake happens. September-December 1999 $300. May 2000 $89.
>Then overproduction combined with dot-com boom liquidations started flooding the market and Feb 2001 $59, by Aug 2001 _256MB_ module was $49. Feb 2002 256MB $34. Finally April 2003 hit the absolute bottom with $39 _512MB_ DIMMs
In 1999 512MB could cost $400, but it could also cost $1200 :)
I bought a DC on launch week, it's one of my favourite consoles of all time. I still own one. But what has bleemcast got to do with what the parent said?
The Dreamcast charm is partly how simple it is, a jellybean CPU. The PowerVR is competent but it’s not outside the norm for 3D accelerators of the period (and there was a mass produced PCI card available of it). Nothing about the Dreamcast is exotic. Though the pack in modem and VMU are neat (did say “maybe” for the DC). GD-ROM vs DVD was obviously a dumb move. Perhaps Sega didn’t have the war chest to loss leader a DVD Dreamcast (they didn’t have the vision either at that point).
A technical demo like Bleemcast doesn’t demonstrate how far ahead something is, it has to be seen relative to the hardware of a similar generation. Having said that the PS2 which had some early programming hiccups would go on to eat DC’s lunch.
...and PS2 eating the DC's lunch has more to do with Sega and their terrible decisions made in prior generations that burnt retailers and consumers alike than anything else.
The things the PS2 had going for it at launch was a cheap DVD player(yes Sega didn't have the money for this. They were very close to bankruptcy at the time) and Sony's hype.
My main worry is this is just another step towards government controlling discourse online. Once implemented it will become difficult to be anonymous on social media.
Some one in the UK civil service was quoted in the Times, they stated that the online safety act is not about protecting children. It is about controlling the discourse.
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