You don't "own" the hardware or the platform, you may create the code but you depend on the whims of others whether it is deployed and continues to work on such devices.
Best bet is to do mobile web development, most of the parts can be under your control and those that aren't (the phone) are beholding to web standards which can't change too radically.
Company develops product A with a crack team of developers, cutting edge stuff. Product is shipped, so the star developers go off to another project or are put in lousy roles and leave. Product doesn't change for a few years and is in maintenance mode.
When time comes to crank out a new version, those hotshot developers are gone and the new crew doesn't quite get it - they want to change the tool-chain from X to Y, remove that overly complex (but very useful) feature, radically change the UX, incorporate AI, etc. New version is mostly compatible but way different.
I do resource directories so have many bits of useful information, a big target for search engines.
Most of my filtering is just to keep the bots from clicking on some forms and excluding them from visitor logs. No problem with most crawlers. The bad ones are the ones that cycle through IPs, mimic agents, and space out their hits, they are the ones that clog my logs - some hit the same page multiple time (I assume some SEO tactic, which is not how my sites rank items).
My best bet might be IP filtering (restricting to US only) - wondering if any have implemented that (is that a big hit on page load time?), I would think with VPNs that doesn't always work that well...
I've banned China and Singapore traffic, then seen that traffic pop up from various countries globally. I assume they detect the block and move to rotating proxies.
Consistency and accuracy - especially in financial matters is very important. Having things go bad because of a click or aberrant hallucination would ruin small business. And who is liable when things either go south or providing guarantees of stability.
Simon's BASIC was buggy. Some worked great some didn't work well at all (like line renumber) IIRC there was an updated version out there..
Second, I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC but it was a good start (still the best line editor of most systems, just cursor up change the line, press return and done), The no-frills in the language but not in the capabilities made it a platform where there was no one definate way to do graphics or sound so there was a lot of experimentation most good, and some downright awesome. I think not having those features baked in the ROMs made the community a lot more dynamic.
> I think the power of the 64 was its' limited BASIC
I am torn about this. Forcing people to use machine language for anything serious makes sense. The 10,000-strong C64 software library exists. Your point about the great screen editor is well taken.
On the other hand, what about all those who would have experimented on their own more if they could have done things with CBM BASIC 2.0 that Atari BASIC has out of the box? Applesoft BASIC has more graphics support than CBM BASIC, too, and there was never a problem with converting experimenters into "real" developers.
LibreOffice Draw is quite capable. Though for some better formatting (linked text boxes) you might have to use Writer, which is still good abut a bit more klunky as you are fighting the formatting of the writer document layer if you want varied text boxes....
Thus far I have had pleasant experience with LibreOffice. Shockingly pleasant and easy to use and fast. I moved most of my MS Office printable media to it. I had to chase down different font weights to capture as close to the thickness that Word/Excel + print drivers would output, but the Libre output is to my eyes a lot better in almost every case, so that’s a win I’ll take.
Decades ago I was using OpenOffice but it had a long way to go back then, so I stuck with MS Office all these years.
I’m sure I’ll come across something that doesn’t quite work right but it’s unlikely I’ll encounter an Excel application built on macros in the wild anymore. (famous last words)
n.b. I have no idea what the hell is up with Microsoft over the last year. I feel like HN could use a thread where people just share horror stories. I’ve heard about the CoPilot nonsense, the cramming of AI into everything, but I stuck to Windows 10 to avoid as much of it as possible, although now it’s EOL. That they’re just shitting on everything solid they’ve done over the years does not make any sense to me.
1) I was more into messaging so I would log in and read and post in the forums. Sometimes if they have a good files area might download some programs, and play a game or two (usually some simple competition game like Risk like ones.) Many boards were long distance so after a few years I started my own BBS
2) Computer magazines had BBS lists sometimes. Local computer stores usually had a corkboard with flyers of local BBSs and word-of-mouth amongst the nerds in the area, at school, etc. To connect I usually used CCGMS terminal for the C64 (for the color/graphics BBSs CCGMS is still used for the C= Telnet BBSs) and Desterm 128 or NovaTerm for the PC boards so I could see the ANSI characters. For running BBSs there were many some in BASIC or compiled BASIC, some in ML and most with a mixture ML communications/data code with BASIC modules. I ended up with Image BBS which was a modular BBS system for the C64, had lots of community mods available.
3) fragmented, depending on what you were interested in, my BBS was Commodore, Gaming, and Science Fiction forums and Commodore Files and some games. There were PC boards with the fancier games and larger FIDONet forums some other forums - sports, PC, etc. There were Apple, Atari Amiga BBSs a lot of like computers would contact those to get info and download programs (Amigas were probably the biggest on pirate software BBSs, there probably was PC ones out there too I didn't know those)
4) More fan oriented talking about your favorite things, not always too technical. Sometimes there would be some e-newsletter you could download to read more technical stuff. DIY discussions and helping others. Pretty much like internet forums and resource sites today.
5) for us some bits of BASIC and assembly, game logic, etc.
I don't think it's complicated but I think it simplifies a complex problem I had.
A thing for storing and comparing schedules
a weekly schedule is turned into a run-length list (the week is in minutes 0 to 10079 - so 540,1020,1980,2460 would be 9am to 5pm on Sunday and Monday). Makes it easy to unpack the list into an array and do basic math comparison can determine whether schedule A is within schedule B or get the difference in minutes that schedule A falls outside of schedule B etc.
I would say the most complicated ones I've done are some SQL queries where I had to break it into stages to reduce the amount of grinding it did on a query that was combining many tables.
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