Re: UI elements that make it obvious what they do?
*Coloured* rectangles? That's going too far. Make them the same colour, its going to be far to confusing if the user can tell where one control ends and another starts.
1293 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2010
Isn't that supposed to head to Barnard's Star, not clean up space-junk?
This re-using of names for space-stuff get's confusing. I also get confused every time Orion is mentioned, my first thought is the nuclear bomb propelled version, not the more recent project.
For me it was a different cheat that let me see the whole thing. I found where the prices of upgrades were stored and set them to zero. Now I originally thought this would just make sure I could buy whatever was available at each shop. However it seems that what was available at each shop was based on price, so by zeroing the prices I'd enabled myself to get a fully armed ship from the first shop.
Between his various projects Musk appears to be genuinely trying to save the world single-handed (or at least ensure some of the human race survives it's end if it all goes wrong). How much more of a good guy do you want?
(Either that or he's not joking about the white cat, and super-villain volcano lair)
Clouds that give nice sunsets.
Clouds that look like a <insert animal here>
Clouds that are black over Bill's mother's
Clouds that piss it down with rain when you have a BBQ
Clouds that guarantee any interesting astronomical event isn't visible from the UK
etc.
Surely it's more about speed relative to a given frame of reference, rather than relative size.
If someone is daft enough to stand on a railway track it's likely they'll get hit by a train. Even though the train is much larger it's the one doing the hitting, since it's the one moving relative to the likely frame of reference (the ground).
If we take the frame of reference as Mars then both Maven and the moon will both be moving and at similar speeds, so hitting each other is the appropriate description.
Other than some nostalgic styling I see nothing interesting about the new 3310. As the article says it's basically the exact same entry-level feature phone that Nokia have never stopped making.
I'd actually been hoping (but really not expecting) that they'd take the opportunity to actually make a good feature phone again. For years they've been inferior to older models (3G and >2mp cameras used to exist on feature phones, but not anymore). If they'd instead done a phone with modern capabilities (4G, Wifi, decent camera, high DPI (but still small) screen, etc) but with buttons and an S40 style interface I may have actually been interested (though I'll accept I'm probably in a minority).
You don't need to understand how something works for it to be useful. All that matters is that for a given input it consistently produces a desirable result. For example although we've now got a pretty decent understanding of bovine biology the human race was successfully exploiting that biology as a means of turning grass into milk for a long time before we understood how it worked.
It depends...
I used to have a non-standard format utility which would create (for example) an 800K floppy by formatting with an extra sector (*). On some PCs these discs were fine as standard, others needed a small TSR to read them.
Later versions of MS-DOS actually allowed the creation of these discs without a special utility, if command line arguments were used to specify the sector count.
(*) more than one extra sector or additional tracks were also possible, but reliability went down as sectors went up. Extra tracks was dependent on the drive being able to move the heads far enough.
The one that slightly surprised me was on a two-sided advertising screen. One side had a BSOD, which in itself wasn't too surprising. However the other side of the same display was running fine. I can just about understand using a PC to run something which is just a display screen (easier to update content than with a simple TV), but 2 in one box? Surely it would be more sensible to run both screens from the same PC?
I don't see it meaning fewer cars on the road. People not owning their own cars may mean less cars in total, but more of them actually on the road. Not having your own car parked and waiting at the start of your journey will mean a shared car having to drive to you, for however long that takes that's an extra car on the road (rather than parked).
I think things probably varied a lot by school. Overall numbers of computers in that era were low enough that the relatively small sample within a school wasn't certain to follow the national trend.
Ours was mostly Speccys, with the Dragon comming in second place (but at least there were enough of us to be able to "own" more games than we'd bought). I only remember one BBC (yes it belonged to the swottiest kid in the school) and one C64 (some of the Speccy owners were fond of calling it a "Commode").