mister_mort

Did Hotmail offer email redirection at that time? I can't remember whether that sort of thing that would make it easy to switch away was offered.

For a similar fun set of reviews of past predictions of future tech, I recommend looking through Youtube channel "KnowledgeHusk"

Selected videos:

"People in the 80s Making Fun of Predictions From the 60s" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-B6zeAKAEQ

"2002 Tried To Predict 2025" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMZ9odjhOnU

"Terrible Predictions About The Future From 2005" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9kf9KLVVQ

(and many more can be found in their Retrofuturism playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZkkImzuw5q9Kk5KIq1yw... )

You're right about that, Anki is named after the Japanese word for memorisation. (暗記 - あんき "anki")

https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9A%97%E8%A8%98

Was the demo version a separate story campaign like the Starcraft one was?

Code golf is fun as a challenge, but it's obviously hell to find in a script someone else wrote that you're supposed to maintain.

FFMPEG does autodetection of what is inside a file, the extension doesn't really matter. So it's trivial to construct a video file that's labelled .mp4 but is really using the vulnerable codec and triggers its payload upon playing it. (Given ffmpeg is also used to generate thumbnails in Windows if installed, IIRC, just having a trapped video file in a directory could be dangerous.)

I think this effect might not be limited to video games - I remember when I was learning 3D modelling and rendering a few decades ago I started to break down scenery in my mind automatically, a permanent "how would this be made or faked in a program if you were to do it".

I think excessive concentration on a new skill can just create that pattern in your mind, no matter what the source.

Have you ever played the bizarro dungeon RPG "Kowloon's Gate"? Navigating through that madness might be right up your alley.

For a lot of young people the screen is social - the equivalent of the long after-school phonecalls from the before times. Be it games or just Discord, it's still comms.

If this is truly per application, the companies that try to boost their chances with the lottery by creating multiple applications for the same person are going to get hit hard. Phantom companies that only exist on paper so people can tweak the probabilities are now liabilities.

We'll see a rebalancing for sure.

Minecraft solves the issue by making the bottom layer of its maps a special kind of block ('bedrock') that cannot be broken with any tool in the game without use of admin-level commands or the 'creative' mode.

I'm curious about this - do you have the name of the charity in question?

Every so often Apple will themselves feature a selection of popular pay-once-and-get-it-all games in the store as an ad capsule.

... actually, I just checked, and if you scroll down enough in the Games tab on your iPhone's App Store app, they seem to be running it now under "Pay Once & Play". Might be worth a look.

You can do it, I did it fairly recently with a phone I did a full wipe of.

You need to manually open the phone entry in iTunes and look for the tones category in there, and drag the files into it. You used to be able to put the tones directly into iTunes, but now it's a matter of dragging the files directly to the phone's tone category itself.

The Telecom guy might have been pulling your leg, but microwave dishes are known to be dangerous if you're in the wrong spot in front of them. (The traditional story is that Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket get melted by the radar set he was working on. However, the effect had been demonstrated at least a decade earlier.)

FYI there is an offical high(er) res version of METACHAOS available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsOSsiJAe9E

Opening the site and immediately seeing it drawing a frame from Bad Apple was amusing, I suspect someone will attempt to automate submissions of frames from that video at some point.

I guess the big question for me here is - what is the state of stuff like "implied licenses" in Britain?

I suspect the heat of the dryer would be more of a problem than the water.

Some of the hidden stuff in Goldeneye was available without memory hacking, it just required a long sequence of button presses that was unknown for a fair amount of time. I believe stuff like invisibility in multiplayer or the special developer models are only available via button sequences.

Always leave a message in "impossible" code paths, you never know who might read it in the end.