Me too! With Sendkeys and some Win32 API calls, I wrote an AOL add-on (available through Keyword: addons) called AoLOL!. It was my first software business.
Q: How do you identify the AOL window?
A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"
That one of the floppy disks I had for installing VB4 got corrupted due to my idiocy was what got me into Linux and Java, perl, and PHP at the time. Still nothing as good as original VB for GUI stuff.
Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform.
It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year).
The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (they're paid in Robux and converted to USD).
In short, thriving ecosystem with lots of kids having fun doing creative work including creating games, writing code, designing graphics, designing sound effects.
I’ve read about these concerns but my kid is 11 and on there all the time, often with me over her shoulder, and I’ve never seen any sign of it.
It’s a huge platform for kids so I’m sure there are some creeps but there are plenty of controls in place to deal with that and even so, again, I’ve never seen it.
The creeps are only part of the problem. The platform itself is deeply exploitative and harmful. It's full of "you can make games and get rich" messaging that's just a lie. To say nothing of even if you are successful, they will take a staggering cut, and may not pay at all.
tldr; teenagers on the internet. Nothing here described at Roblox doesn't happen to teenagers on the internet as a whole; Discord, IM. At least the people learned a valuable skill in Roblox.
When I heard about how Tesla was training it's AI - without describing objects but instead through direct observation - it reminded me of Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" (1956). Heinlein's character teaches a multipurpose robot how to do any tedious human task through direct observation.
I depends on this, but Google Calendar only lets you add a second time zone. They don't take up much space, I'd love to have 3 or 4. Has anybody figured out a way to do that?
Ha, back in 1995 I could HEAR in advance when my PC was going to crash. I could tell from the certain crunching / grinding sounds of the hard disk. I could hear it and think "Uh oh, here comes a crash..." And then blue screen of death.
Back when I had a PC which was somewhat capable of playing games I would play Left 4 Dead in cooperative mode. You play along with three other players, and navigate the levels attempting to move from one safe room to another, fighting a hoarde of infected. The game attempts to keep the players moving by adding "special" infected, which have different abilities and are good at forcing the team to leave the current area.
One of the special infected was the Tank, which is quite strong and can throw chunks of pavement. I always knew when he was coming because my PC was kind of weak and the fans would go nuts about 30 seconds before he made an entrance. The other players were surprised that I had a sixth sense when it came to knowing when it was happening.
Too much HDD noise was also a really good indication that your computer ran out of memory and stuff is being moved into swap. I remember some occasions where I would alt-tab from a game in Windows 98 and my computer would freeze for half a minute (while doing concerning HDD noises) until I regained control of the desktop.
On the Commodore 64, you knew your floppy was bad when the drive would reset itself, slamming the read/write head against the stop repeatedly. “tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRAAAAAAP” ... eventually knocking the head out of alignment, requiring a hardware fix (not a difficult fix, but tedious). Copy protection was notorious for causing drive knocking, so people often used cracked versions of games they purchased just to prevent it (they tended to load much faster too).
The 1541 doesn't have a track 0 sensor, so they send it 40 step commands to move it back to 0. If it wasn't already on track 40, it will just bump against the stop repeatedly. I've never heard of it damaging the drive though.
My own 1541 never actually had problems, but it was folklore on BBS's, and I saw it happen with my brother's drive. Was easy enough to service though, just loosen a couple screws, nudge the motor a teensy bit, run a diagnostic disk, and repeat ... many many times. They might have just been prone to misalignment anyway, but the knocking couldn't possibly have helped.
Q: How do you identify the AOL window? A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"