Now my local Burger King (in Las Vegas, NV, USA) has a sign at each table telling you that you have 30 minutes to eat your food and get out before you get thrown out for loitering.
Not that this specific quirk is covered in the novel, but a reading of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon would certainly help make one understand the kind of necessary paranoia that would lead to this kind of (important!) protective measure.
(They do have Jeri Ellsworth and some OGs from Commodore signed up to be part of the team though, and seem to genuine love the brand and have nostalgia for the C64, so I have cautious optimism!)
An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled their game.
Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion’s E3 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play, not live gameplay.
I got a look at an early version of StarCraft source code as a reference for the sound library for Diablo 2 and curiosity made me do a quick analysis of the other stuff - they used a very naive approach to C++ and object inheritance to which first time C++ programmers often fall victim. It might have been their first C++ project so they probably needed to start over again anyways. We had an edict on Diablo 2 to make the C++ look like recognizable C for Dave Brevik's benefit which turned out pretty well I think (it was a year late but we shipped).
There's similar for "pack hits" and trading cards, and the regulars learn which hobby shops are reputable and which ones to avoid. Most that remain in business are not scum.
I don't even understand this bug description. It's an edge case I guess I never ran into, so pretty easy to handle.
That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.
To clarify their issue, you can celebrate someones birthday without knowing the year they are born, you only need to know the reocurring date. You can't enter a birthday in apple contacts without a year, if you attempt it it sets it as the date of tomorrow.
My experience with apple is something's either a 2 minute fix or unfixable which to be fair is a reasonable way to do things though much less appealing to me (though less relevant for many users as stock android/windows continue to give users less and less control).
Are we talking about the Contacts app on macOS? I just added the birthday "9/22" to a contact. On blur, the value changes to "September 22". On save, I see the value "September 22" reflected in the birthday field of the contact.
This is supremely cool, thanks for sharing. I'm probably missing something obvious but why would the casting be any more expensive than any other pressing?
Not terribly informed about the pressing process, but as I understand it, it is (or was) effectively a player-process in reverse.
A needle creates the groove(s), replete with bumps for sound, in a not-quite-set (slightly soft) master disc - and I _speculate_ those follow a specific path defined by the mastering tool.
In comparison, playback just drops the needle in the track, and it necessarily follows the extant spiral form.
Making the master of a multi-groove record I'm assuming would require recalibration of the groove-defining mechanism (doubtless carefully designed for conventional layout), once for each of the grooves you want to make, ensuring they each stay within the boundaries defined by the previous grooves.
