It's amusing to see comments implying that the TB-303 is some kind of neglected classic. In reality, it can only be considered to have been forgotten for perhaps the two years after Roland ended production in 1984.
"Acid Tracks" came out in 1987 and I genuinely feel like I've been reading endlessly about the 303 ever since.
Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.
As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.
As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.
But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."
I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.
But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."
Whenever a friend complains about how much they hate games with boss rushes (a mechanic to artificially inflate the length of a game by forcing the player to re-fight all the previous bosses from previous levels in order) - I refer them to the "illusion moment" in Ghosts 'n Goblins.
> I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."
Weeell...here's the thing. Erm. You didn't push through to the end. You just got the "bad" ending.
The game does very much have a proper ending, and reaching it is surprisingly straightforward.
Sure, I get that. I was just aiming for comic effect in pointing out that the player's initial reward for having made it through all the levels of a very difficult game is "lol, do it again".
I did work my way through it a second time to see the "proper ending", and what's interesting is that I remember nothing about it. There's a moral in there, somewhere.
The NES was pretty popular in the UK, wasn’t it? In our solidly working-class home, we had a NES. I remember getting Super Mario Bros 3 for christmas one year and so did many of my friends at school, who all lived in semi-detached two-bedroom homes or masonettes. So, we weren’t in a wealthy bubble or anything. I’m sure it sold multiple millions of copies in the UK and TV shows like GamesMaster were popular and had NES games on a show watched by a pretty big audience. How old were you when it released that you’ve never seen one in the flesh?
Okay, that's interesting. I was in my early teens when it was released. Absolutely everyone I knew had either a Spectrum or a C64, aside from the one rich kid who owned a BBC Micro.
I just had a look at Wikipedia, which says, "the NES performed less well in Europe, where it faced strong competition from the Master System and home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum."
The NES did get past a million sales in the UK, but a lot of them seem to have been at a cheap price late in its life once the SNES and (more so) the Mega Drive had established a popular market for consoles in the UK.
An indicative fact on consoles vs computers that the article highlights: in 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega Drive reached #11 in the UK charts on its release, and it was considered a remarkable and unusual achievement for a console game to do so well.
I got one about 1992ish I think. I had a Gameboy before that. And a spectrum before that. To be honest the game boy was a revelation, smooth fun polished games. My spectrum crashed all the time (thanks Alan sugar and your cheaper manufacturering).
Nintendo games had multi person dev teams instead of some poor guy looking at a video of an arcade machine and trying to recreate at on a spectrum.
Though everyone I knew got a snes and street fighter 2 for Xmas one year. I only knew one other nes owner
The NES is historically amongst the most popular consoles sold in Europe, but with huge differences between countries. In some countries, every kid either had or wanted one, while in others, micros and/or Sega were dominant.
To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [].
You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin
[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
I was on the other side of this, playing Castlevania Symphony of the Night in elementary school. One day I discover something that my friend never found, even though I looked up him, since he completed the whole game.
Well what I discovered was the reverse castle and another 50% of the game he never played. I called him on the landline and started telling him about it and he was saying "what are you even talking about", he thought I was lying until he followed my instructions.
That thing settled exploration as one if my favorite thing in videogames, the discovery was amazing
> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.
Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.
You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.
On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.
If "50% of all jobs will be completely eliminated in two years" comes to pass, then there will be a violent contraction, perhaps even a total collapse, of all advanced economies. In this eventuality, the venture capitalists who funded the rise of AI will lose their money.
If a large percentage of jobs have not been eliminated in two years' time, it will be because AI has largely failed to deliver on its boosters' predictions. In this eventuality, the venture capitalists who funded the rise of AI will lose their money.
The desirable end game is somewhere there in "a large percentage" - e.g. if they can realiably automate 5% of jobs each year, theirs is the Earth and everything that's in it.
Nicely set out. I completely agree with you. I'm also pretty certain - and I say this both as a lover of the arts and as a taxpayer - that I will see no benefit whatsoever in my life, or to society in general, from the works produced under the aegis of this programme.
You know what would have been a worthwhile use of that €114 MM? Improving the pay and conditions of our naval personnel. That way, the nation might now be able to put more than one patrol boat out to sea at a time.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
In this case isn't it more that:
Every sculpture that is made, every picture drawn, every bed left unmade, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
From where I'm sitting, this is theft, its forced wealth redistribution, from people that are potentially already struggling,to people that choose to slum it as artists. Its not even means tested, this really will result in money transferring from those on the edge of poverty to rich art school kids.
There's currently 16,000 homeless / at risk people in Ireland, including 5000 children [0]. I can think of at least one better use for that money.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure there was something else going on in this instance. Baseball caps are an extremely common sight in Dublin. I frequently wear one when I'm out and about here, and nobody has ever taken umbrage or passed comment.
What do you mean, at a practical level, when you set out your "priority list" above? Are you referring to the use of congestion charges to discourage private motor vehicle use?
Not OP, but I don't think congestion charges are the most important part here. It's more about what type of infrastructure to prioritize resources and work for. Basically, the idea is that the town or city should not spend money on building parking, for example, and instead spend it on bike lanes, or two more busses, or some extension to the metro line.
It’s entirely dependent on the situation. Some areas, additional charges work best. In others, it’s possible/necessary to redesign road and street layouts to prioritise higher-density modes of transport and physically discourage low-density modes like cars. This might be priority lights for public transport, lowering speed limits and narrowing streets. In some contexts, it’s necessary to completely disallow cars with things like bus lanes, bike/pedestrian-only areas. Separated tram/metro lines, too.
Most of this infrastructure, in practice, also aids emergency vehicle use as they can usually fit down bike lanes and are obviously able to fit in bus lanes.
There's some muddiness in the terminology here -- OOP is really a design style, and "OOP languages" are generally imperative languages that have sematics that encourage OOP design. It is very possible, even encouraged, to represent state as "Objects" in many functional languages; it's just not really enforced by the language itself.
A good example of this are the object systems in Scheme and Common Lisp (which are less strictly Functional (note the capital F in that word) then something like Haskell).
I asked mainly because of the terminology. I read the primer of how to code OOP in plain C about a decade ago, so I knew that the paradigm definitely can be applied to “non OOP languages”, but I wasn’t sure whether the term “functional programming” allows this or not for some obscure academic reasons. How I coded when I encountered Haskell the first time, I would say it’s definitely possible, but I think, there are some features in Haskell which can be used to break pure functional programming, and if those are not considered FP, then who knows. But I used Haskell the last time a few years ago, so my memory is definitely not clear.
Gilad Bracha talks about how they're not mutually exclusive concepts, and I mostly agree (OOP can have tailcall recursion and first order functions for example). But, the philosophy seems very different: functional programming is "standing above" the data, where you have visibility at all times, and do transformations on the data. OOP is much more about encapsulation, where you "send a message" to an object, and it does its own thing. So you could totally write OOP code where you provide some core data structures that you run operations on, but in practice encapsulation encourages hiding internal data.
Though on further thought, may be this isn't FP vs OOP, because C has a similar approach of "standing above", and C is the hallmark imperative language.
Scala has been that for decades. They are not opposing paradigms. (In fact, mutability has a few edge cases that doesn't play nicely with OOP to begin with)
I mean Scala kind of does both (and then some). I'm not sure I would call it an OOP language, but you can sure write the same gross Java enterprise bloatware in Scala too if you want.
"Acid Tracks" came out in 1987 and I genuinely feel like I've been reading endlessly about the 303 ever since.
reply