Right?? There is a working original After Burner in an arcade in Leeds - on free play and just open to kids of all ages. Sooo many places where it could trap a finger, and it moves pretty violently.

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Congratulations Ben! The game sounds like a dangerous cult that I want no part of. But I've also done game ports recently and was curious - how much of the old codebase did you need to understand (and change!) in order to port it? And how much could you just wrap up / virtualise, and start building on top?

It is a cult and you should run while you still can. I would say to get to the point I'm so now I had to understand 40-50% of it. Let's face it, I work as a software developer and I don't remember half of the code in the project, maybe more, and I wrote it all! And this is way more complex than a business app. The reason I had to understand a lot is hard to explain but I will try... Basically a function might be called "FrontBuy". In this function contains all the math and all the decision tree logic and workflow for every possible situation to buy a stock. So now you say, let's replace all the Win32 dialogs with Electron front end. So what I did was I maintain essentially a high level GUI state manager in the Power Basic which controls the Electron app, using the C++ DLL as a FFI. That being said, you had to have some modicum of understanding of every function, maybe not all the math, but at the very least the workflow and structure of the PB code so that you don't break anything. And oh boy, did I break everything, many many times, to the chagrin of my beta testers.

Ceph can scale to pretty large numbers for both storage, writes and reads. I was running 60PB+ cluster few years back and it was still growing when I left the company.

Ceph, definitely.

The key to having a nice time with Windows is 1) to give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely) and 2) to run a debloater script the moment you pick up a new system e.g. https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.

Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.

Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.

If only our technology were advanced enough that we could have an OS that didn't constantly undermine the user's intentions.

This looks great. In your experience, do you run it once and that's it? Or do you need to re-run as updates add or re-introduce "bloat"?

You definitely should run it after updates.

Personally I don't think I've ever re-run it. I think I've clicked a few buttons as I've seen alerts about new options appearing. But ultimately it's just a bunch of powershell commands to remove packages and set options. So I'd assume it's safe to run regularly.

Thanks. I was asking because I was hoping to run it for a relative's computer that I am reinstalling Win11 on now, and they would not be capable of re-running it after the fact.

> give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely)

Make that 64 if you’re obliged to run Teams. I wonder how many power plants the US could retire if we all stopped using it.

I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.

If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.

Or buy an IOT LTSC license to have an officially debloated version.

Or don't buy a licence and use it anyway.

How? It's only available to companies.

There are sites that will happily sell you keys, though I don’t feel qualified to comment on their legitimacy.

You could also sail the seven seas and run an AutoKMS script, though that might (and probably will) include some malware.

If your options include paying for piracy or pirating for free, always pirate for free.

Linux is not getting better in those respects, either. DE's are crazy bloated. For everyone bitching about control panels, tell me how is it done in Linux? In the WM control panel or the DE control panel? Or some obscure .conf file you must edit by hand? Your guess is as good as mine and it's beyond disorganized. If I want to change a font it's a game of three card monte.

Linux desktop environments remind me what TempleOS would look like if it was designed by committee.

Have to disagree.

Gnome for example has been working hard to simplify things (maybe a bit too hard?). The gnome settings panel is significantly simpler than win11 and osx dito.

If you want to dive deeper there is a separate tweak app (not as simple), no reason fiddling with .conf files.

Bloat is what you call any feature you're not actively using.

Only difference is on Windows nobody wants those "features".

There's a difference between features you don't use and pre-installed Minecraft and ads.

Try a distro like Fedora. I mostly use Arch, but I’ve found Fedora to be an excellent out of the box experience.

This is such a fascinating & personally inspiring time for me as a programmer.

The real game Bandersnatch (as a business folly) was something else - the "coming soon" advert from just before Imagine's bankruptcy would probably ring an alarm bell now - https://nosher.net/archives/computers/imagine_eugeneevans_yo...

Some of the programmers of Bandersnatch did release Gift From The Gods from the ashes of Bandersnatch - which I definitely had on my Spectrum! But it was very confusing - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/13/giftgod.htm

This 1984 documentary from the BBC archive covers Imagine's growth & demise, must have been a great visual reference for Brooker making the show, and the top comment has some more detail on Imagine's hiring spree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buuUZFh_pyk also also check out 4:30 or so, where they show the game and the device that will "eventually be reduced to a small cartridge and sold with the game"!!

Also also the name Ritman is probably a reference to Jon Ritman, programmer of the brilliant Head Over Heels. But he was nothing to do with Imagine. He still gives interviews and seems lovely.

And the advice is not (necessarily) "work extra, unpaid hours".

Exactly, working harder doesn’t mean putting in extra hours. It means taking on projects with larger scope, impact and ambiguity during your normal working hours

I've been happy with the solution of switching off notifications from apps that interrupt me with promotions - one strike and they're out.

The remaining notifications are _still_ frequent enough that no single app can expect to get my attention with a single buzz.

It's not like apps don't upsell to when I _open_ them and have to swipe away ads before I can use them. So why give them another channel?

25-years ago me is going to roll his eyes so hard, but you know where I don't mind slightly-targeted ads? My email & my doormat. Send me a catalogue, I love a catalogue.

> I've been happy with the solution of switching off notifications from apps that interrupt me with promotions - one strike and they're out.

I have exactly the same policy. But in my case I am forced to keep notifications enabled from apps like MyGate (since nobody would be able to visit me without it) and I have no say in the matter - my gated society uses it and my only way out is to pay for the app itself.

Ah OK - personally that would move it from an "annoying app with adverts" charge (that I'd resist) to a "leasehold bullshit" charge (that I'd pay).

I am stuck similarly with the ClassDojo app that my kids school uses to communicate with parents. The notifications are just "You have a new notification!" which leads to a slow app load, an upsell splash, before finally having to scroll to find the important message from a teacher. In this case though, paying would not make it any less slow to use.

I just check once a week instead, and the parents WhatsApp group fills in the gaps for me.

I also do my best to stick to a "one strike and they're out" personal policy.

But I also have apps that push marketing through notifications _and_ are urgent on a reoccurring basis (usually delivery or rideshare apps). For those, I'd love if there was a system notification setting (per app) for "allow notifications from this all for the next X hours" _and_ a simple UX to make that happen.

Go on then, what answer do you get? Was it right?

And users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.