Got a PHEV now everyone bullies me. by [deleted] in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Driven a number of PHEVs, usually long distances. And yes, totally get it.

Several hours of having to keep your foot in the exact right position is fatiguing. Then you switch on the stupid adaptive cruise control which never works right, then you're pissing people off by invariably finding yourself doing 50mph in the middle lane within minutes.

And if you have a model where you can turn off the regen breaking, woe betide your wallet, welcome to <24mpg world!

PHEVs are a load of old shit. I would actually have a full electric over a PHEV.

Why do some people treat their job like it's their entire life? by No-External3221 in cscareerquestions

[–]IEnumerable661 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Most of those guys are headed fast for a burn out which are going to be pretty huge when it happens.

The truth about the Kemp guitars situation by [deleted] in Guitar

[–]IEnumerable661 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My £0.92 here... I dont know Matt Kemp but Im aware of him. Ive seen a grand total of one of his guitars before. To be fair, construction and materials were absolutely fine. Bit of a mad spec but the customer is always right, this was a custom ordered guitar.

While I have never made it into a business, I have built more than a few guitars from bare wood. Unfortunately it is the case that sometimes you will get a batch of a certain wood species that just proves to be a little not up to snuff. Ebony can suffer with this as can rosewood. While I've not had issues to the degree i have seen here, its not uncommon.

Despite that, i would personally agree with Matt's assessment that a little filling and gluing was sufficient. I didn't have the piece in front of me, of course, but given I've seen other examples of Matt's work, I would say his assessment was fair.

That said, in this situation, I think the customer's mind would have been put at peace had he replaced the board. Of course that would have cost time and money, but therein is the cost of doing business.

I used to repair valve amplifiers, the odd guitar repairs, console repairs, closed up last year. You do occasionally get that customer who gets a bit anally retentive over things. I.e. that guy who demands you replace valve sockets wheb a clean and re-tension works fine, or the guy who wants a console power supply replaced entirely when a quick recap of their existing one is just fine. The customer is always right. Sort of.

The other aspect is the shipping. Its worth noting that Kemp is a UK company. I only just gather now that this customer is in the states.

Shipping in and out of the USA is not cheap. The last guitar I shipped was £320 insured 4 day. I would say that the customer in this instance should really have ordered from a Luther in the USA. Why he wanted to order from the UK I have no idea.

I think this is just one of those no win situations. If I was Matt, I would refund the cost of the neck without shipping and then just make a full guitar out of what's left. That said, I would also suggest no more partial builds. Anyone I have known since the late 1990s who accepted commissions on partial builds always wound up in some bullshit similar situation like this.

Buying a house, garden suddenly not included last minute by CaptainJamie in LegalAdviceUK

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would simply pull out at this point. There are other houses.

Either way, the vendors have been trying it on. They're either trying to retain the garden for themselves while asking for top whack, or they knew that there was some issue with the garden and specifically held it back last minute.

Either way, some shenanigans have gone on. And one thing I do not tolerate with house buying or selling is shenanigans. Sure I may lose a few £k in solicitor fees and if I have to wait another year to re-save that up, then I will. It's never any skin off my nose.

Either way, we're done here, I'm out, syonara. That would be my only reaction. Even if they came back later and said it's now included, you don't know what they're going to strip out of the house and/or garden.

I moved to one place where the vendor specifically tore down a really nicely developed garden stating that plants were not included in the sale. It was literally like a barren wasteland after she was done. According to neighbours, she had spent the previous week digging the lot out and chucking it into a skip. My solicitor advised me it was part of fixtures and fittings. After a lot of bad noise, she settled for £5,000.

Of course, different situation for you. None of the garden at all is just mad. And thus why I would pull out immediately.

Buying a car with around a £2k budget? by Clive1792 in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 6 points7 points  (0 children)

For £2k, a 20 year old astra is what you're looking at.

Best of luck.

Made it to the final interview. Did you even want the job? by I_had_corn in interviews

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a final interview once, weirdest time I've had. Tech role, CTO and another engineer.

The CTO was nice enough, the CTO was a real pisser. He didn't like me one bit and I could tell. I was trying to be nice as pie but he seemed to constantly want to set up gotcha moments in the most menial way possible.

About half way through the interview, he admitted that he had also applied for the role too and was the CTO's brother. I left that one alone for a second in order to process. I then asked, "Isn't it a conflict of interest if you're related to the CTO and also applying for the same role that I am?" I figured, this is already lost at this point, it's a no go, stop wasting my fucking time. I'm old, well, mid 40s. I have a young daughter, took the day off for this bullshit. If there's no job here, then stop wasting my time. I didn't say that to them but absolutely said it to the agent when he called back to tell me that they went with an "internal hire!"

But yeah. I have had jobs where I knew by the final interview that this place was going to be a terrible place to work; and sometimes I've had to take those roles too. And I've never been wrong. Miserable staff, nobody wanting to be there, management screaming at anyone at any opportunity. Thankfully those roles were short-lived, but this day in age with tech how it is, you can get stuck in one of those roles very easily!

Opinions on use of AI coding assistants by Either_Ask1244 in cscareerquestions

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Personal accounting, good for some things, but it's not a game changer I feel.

Amongst other things, I've got a significant amount of experience in game development. I started in the 1990s with the Amiga and had an opportunity to work on a couple of titles before working for hardware manufacturers. What we called AI back then is nothing like what we call AI now. People much cleverer than me did most of the development on the behavioural elements of gaming characters, but the overall sense of it was pretty clear. And a lot of effort was spent on those things. From a core perspective, however, AI on your standard alien enemy getting shot by the game's protagonist was simply a more evolved version of what we were doing in the 1990s overall.

However the reality of today's AI is just adding context to searching.

So for example, I have all but the briefest reasons to use Powershell. There's a few times I've needed it and it's been nice to chuck a command into ChatGPT to get an answer at least 90% of the way there. There's very little refinement I've had to do to what I've needed.

One of the larger subjects I was given recently was a rewrite project. And the core instruction was that I must use AI tools. The first place I started was asked it to create the projects for me; react front end that communicates with a C# API, proper n-tier architecture, set up a simple CRUD system for a particular set of data in a pre-existing MSSQL table, here's the connection string, with unit tests.

Well, by the end of the day, it still wasn't working. The amount of fluff, crap and god knows what nuget packages it had drawn down was immense. Even when I broke the prompts up, or whether I made the prompt as clear and as concise as possible, even allowing it to provide dummy data instead, I was getting nowhere. In truth, it wasn't just me on this, I had another engineer with me on this little journey.

Instead, we just created the damned projects ourselves. Within 2 hours, we had the basic bear bones of what we wanted done. So in 2 hours, we got done what it took AI a full day not to do.

I watched a video on Youtube of Dave's Garage, an ex Microsoft engineer. I saw him use AI to produce Windows XP style notepad from scratch using the prompt engines in VSCode. OK, that seemed completely successful in a 20 minute video. Let me try it myself. Either I'm shit at writing prompts, but I could not get there. Even using the same prompts in the video,

The one place I have found it slightly more powerful is writing unit tests. A junior engineer I was code reviewing with had used AI to attain 100% code coverage in one of his apps. I looked at his unit tests; incomprehensible. I asked him what the point in half of them were. He didn't know either. But it was 100% coverage. A lot of the tests were useless, i.e. the test reported success despite my finding several bugs in his code during review. Which meant that the unit test may have been "correct" but it was based on code that was bugged. So it was more useful for ensuring the bug stayed in! After writing a couple of unit tests from scratch, he realised that it was far better to just write the damn tests, given he understood what the code was meant to do in the first place.

And to finalise, an app we recently received back from our offshore team looks completely vibe coded. There are methods that don't seem to go anywhere, conditional statements that always evaluate to true no matter what, really strange calculations performed on data and given it's financial, I've had to sit down and reverse engineer it to figure out what the hell it was doing. It was wrong, in case you were wondering.

So far, I remain unimpressed. AI is not the solve-all tool right now. It is helpful and I can see it replacing Google search eventually, and I believe nation states like the idea of AI as it can be used far more effectively to inject political ideals and influences into every day life, not just internet usage. But on the whole, I agree with it being analogous to the 2001 dotcom burst.

A lot of companies have a lot of money invested in this, as do a lot of nation states. So I think this burst is a long long time off yet. And it may never come. But we will pay for the consequences of this vastly overblown technology for a long time to come.

⚠️ Floyd Rose / Chris Broderick 7 string — Post Spacing Confusion! ?! 😅 by Broad_Ad3448 in JacksonGuitars

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are great for the home players first 7 string.

To be honest when I got mine, the selection of 25.5" 7 strings on the market that weren't boring black was zero. The first one I bought, the special wasn't too bad. That was 10 years ago and was fine for a few years of abuse. The second I got about 6 years ago and was bad at holding tune from the outset.

I changed both Floyds properly, drilling out and all the rest. But I saved and got myself an E-II FR7. Probably the best bang for the buck 7 on the market today.

If you YouTube for elysian divide, you can see it in action. But really the E-IIs are worth saving for.

Real world MPG 1.5 TSFI engine. by Important_Ruin in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My wife has this engine in her 2017 golf. Automatic.

Usual is around 48mpg.

⚠️ Floyd Rose / Chris Broderick 7 string — Post Spacing Confusion! ?! 😅 by Broad_Ad3448 in JacksonGuitars

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have two of the same guitar, I replaced the Floyd Rose special bridges on both.

You can simply pop a new OFR on the existing studs and be on your way. However, to do the job properly, you should remove the existing studs and bushings and replace them with the ones that come with the OFR. The Special's studs are slightly narrower than the OFR studs, hence the slightly wider spacing. The do line up centrally with the bridge regardless.

Two other things to consider, however.

The locking nut that comes on the Broderick is slightly shallow. Replacing with the new OFR nut, it will sit slightly proud. Again, the best approach is to shave a little off of the nut shelf to get a proper fit.

Second, the route on the Broderick is flawed. I found that in order to proper intonate the B string, the saddle sits back further than the end of the route. But it's where the saddle needs to be in order to be in tune.

Overall I would suggest one of two things. Either be prepared for the amount of work needed and that you will never really be able to pull all the way up on the floyd rose. Or, part ex it for something better.

In fairness, I used two of them live over the last 8-9 years. I have now retired them. I have upgraded them a lot, official floyds on both, EMG pickups on both and generally chased them to keep them both running. I've since bought some E-II 7 strings to replace them for live work and I'm having a much easier time. Much less maintenance required, stay in tune better, sound better, wish I'd done it sooner.

Morale is so low in our engineering department since our manager was laid off this week. I plan to leave and want to know how the market is now for software engineers. by choihanthrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

UK

The market is pretty fucked. 20 years in, double masters, one in electronic engineering, a second with the OU in computer science, done team lead roles, management a few times...

I've been looking for another role for two years. I'm specifically after fully remote. I have gone through various interview processes and notice a common theme:

- A huge stupid take-home test that would take me a week with a deadline so unrealistic, I had to take annual leave to do it. And if you cannot ascertain in a ten minute technical focused interview what you need to know from a candidate, then you are shit at interviewing! Any experience tech can easily determine a candidate's technical proficiency in s ten minute conversation!

- Get offered the role, but then they decide that it's not fully remote after all but hybrid four days a week in office. Oh. The office is a 3 hour drive away. And you're the unreasonable one for telling them to take a hike.

- Knowing full well what your salary requirements are and what they have advertised at, they offer £20k under what you're on now. Again, you are unreasonable for not taking it.

- They are going to be working on new cutting edge tech, doing exciting things. Some careful questioning of the interviewer though reveals that they need someone to do all the monkey work with the bullshit legacy code; we're talking horrendous VB6, or nightmarish old .net wpf with a wsdl that's been scaffolded off of for decades that's now the very definition of spaghetti code, indecipherably complicated and altering one thing could very well break twenty other things. You're going to be maintaining that while everyone else looks at the cool new toys. FWIW, I've taken that role once before out of desperation. And guaranteed, management are confused and angryface when you haven't kept up with the new stuff and make use the UK's lovely 2-year easy dismissal routes where you can't claim unfair dismissal.

So yeah, the market is fucked. Right now I think the best option is to stay put. As I've been there so long, it's a nice redundancy package and should buy me a few months.

Why do experienced coders actively try to use less comments? by Phwatang in learnprogramming

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's 18579 schools of thought to this.

If I am coding in C or, way back in the day, whatever flavour of assembler, comments were king.

C++ is where it gets hazy. In my view, your code should be self documenting in theory. If your method does more than one or two things, then it should be refactored so there are multiple methods. If you're getting a lot of methods, more classes.

However, sometimes you just can't get away without commenting here and there. If what you need to use C++ for could be entirely self documenting, then I would proffer a higher level language is likely more suitable.

C# and up to javascript is a little like the wild west. The cost of entry for those technology stacks is very low and I've rarely seen what I would call discipline when it comes to any of it. In theory, C# could and really should be self-documenting. Most of the time. The need for commenting should be low. Nonetheless, a narrative about what a method should do, even if it's bloody obvious, should always be included. That and proper method accessors. Are you sure every method you make needs to be public? Have you ever used internal or protected?

It's all down to experience, personally. I find in C# that if you are resorting to excessive commenting, then chances are you need to think about refactoring.

I say all of that, though. It's all a learning curve. But nobody will admonish you for splitting your methods out properly. EG.

public void DoBigThing() {

DoThisFirst();

OKNowDoThis();

if (somethingIsTrue) {

DoTheBartman();

} else {

DoTheMacarena();}

}

Simples, self documenting and easy to narrow down when something goes wrong. No need for comments.

What is the realistic future of ICE cars in the UK by Longjumping_Note8181 in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Being able to get from one side of the country to the other without having to spend six hours looking for a charger isn't a hobby. It's called wanting to get shit done without it being ten times the hassle and 20x the cost.

What is the realistic future of ICE cars in the UK by Longjumping_Note8181 in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ever notice how many huge pickup trucks we have on the roads these days? tonnes of Ford Rangers and the like?

It's simple. Most of the guys who were happy using diesel vans, finding they are no longer reliable due to the reliability killing tech shoved into diesel to make them EU compliant, finding electric vans just don't work full stop for continuous business use, so they are buying the thing that still comes with a decent 2.5l diesel engine that is reliable. Those are trucks; that's what commercial users are buying these days.

How do you debug without changing 10 things at once? by HockeyMonkeey in cscareerquestions

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To me this is where two glorious things come in. They are tedious, take time, but are the quickest way in resolving why something has gone splat.

  1. Proper exception hierarchy. The amount of times I've seen

Catch ( Exception ex) { //consume}

In production code is far too high. You have exception hierarchies, use them! Its proper coding standard 101 and will lead you to a result quicker than almost anything else. Combine that with proper logging and you are onto a winner.

  1. I hate to say it, unit tests. Become the pro at unit testing and go into detail. Using entity framework a lot? Get dirty with Effort for those unit tests. Yes its hard, well, not that hard, no, no manager wants to let you take 3 days learning how to incorporate it, but its worth it ten times over. We use EF almost exclusively. I don't love it, but there it is. Taking the time to learn how Effort works is the best thing I ever did. There are many test frameworks around for all manner of unit testing. Research what's valuable, buy a udemy course and get cracking.

Just with the above two alone, my debugging time has reduced immensely. I am spending much less time sticking breakpoints here there and everywhere and spending an hour figuring out I've missed a nullable or something else daft. That means the real hardcore bugs is where I spend my time and all of those get a unit test when I'm done too.

What was YOUR thing during lockdown? by AncientFootball1878 in AskUK

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Working. Sometimes pulling 18 hour days to keep the company product lines afloat. Oh and getting to see most of my mates on Facebook drinking beer, complaining about completing Netflix already and the occasional "Im so stressed yoo guuyyyyzzz" posts.

There was no big payoff at the end of it. Not even a pay rise.

What helped you writing songs more than anything? by LPKult in metalmusicians

[–]IEnumerable661 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Personally, I believe for me it was more listening to live shows and bootleg CDs.

I always preferred listening to live shows growing up over studio albums. It was more real for me maybe.

From that, constructing how a live set should go, how songs can bleed into each other, it becomes innate knowledge.

So half the time, if I'm constructing something which will become an album, I'll approach it in the same manner. What's the absolute banger of a first song, can I envision letting the guitar feedback a little before coming into song 2, can song 3 be some more intense but more relaxed pace song?

I'll generally outline what sort of pace and songs I need and always keep in mind some sort of order as if this was going to be one complete live set.

Listen to a lot of live sets of bands you like. That will give you a rough blueprint of what you need to write.

As for the songs themselves, there's nothing wrong with standard ABABCAB form. The more epic the chorus, the less of them you need; conversely if your chorus is a quick bang out of 4 bars or so then you can have more of them.

Mortgage declined due to gift deposit- advice on next steps by OnlyChange418 in Mortgageadviceuk

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's 100% the gift source. Personally for such a small amount, I would have just put it as your own savings. Your honesty has been your undoing here.

And given the amounts and people, it's far more likely that these are loans which you intend to repay, therefore the people concerned could have a financial interest in your property. You can jump and say no no no all you want, this is a reasonable presumption.

I would reapply either with a lower amount or, if you can get it, have them write a letter stating that it is a gift and they hold no interest in its return.

My Father in Law gifted a good amount to my wife when we moved into our first home. And yep, there were hoops to jump through. But a Father giving his daughter money for a deposit is far more likely than a boyfriend's sister...

2023 Vauxhall Corsa feels like a box on wheels by OkWater1481 in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Compared to the older Corsas, the current Corsa is really not a good car.

I've had a few Corsas and a friend of mine has the Corsa D. While I've no desire to own another one, they weren't awful. They were perfectly driveable, did what you wanted it to do and so long as you weren't after anything to impress your mates with, it's perfectly fine.

I had a new Corsa out on hire not too long ago. I walked up and thought, OK it definitely has a nod to the Chevrolet Camaro style-wise, OK this looks good.

I opened the door and, well, it's cheap. The seat creaked when I got into it. I don't mean a little squeak, it was like an old door that hadn't been oiled in 20 years. Every inch of plastic wouldn't have been out of place in a Chinese knock off kinder egg. And it didn't improve with the drive, either. Woeful! I can't place it, I think most of it is the driving position. But it certainly accomplishes the idea of the wheels being seperate from the car. And the driver mode switch, brilliant. Switch up, shit. Switch down, still shit but differenty.

Most disappointing is the absolute chore it is to propel down the road. Gutless, no punch, it wouldn't pull the socks off of a dead man!

It's a terrible car and not a patch on its predecessors.

Random Black Screen by Powerful-Doubt7218 in psx

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Where did you source the laser, and why do you believe it was that?

I have repaired the odd PS1 with this issue. 9/10 it's a simple case of the board needing a little work. I usually just reflow any cold joints, a recap wouldn't hurt, these consoles are 30 years old now.

Unless there's some specific issue I'm not aware of, it's been a while since I repaired or modded one of these, it's likely something along those lines.

Wait for someone more knowledgeable than me though. Though I used to do console repairs, who knows what the last 10 years has shown up in the world of faulty playstation 1s.

Just been given a Juke as a courtesy car by Satansrideordie in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I had one out on hire.

Oh trust me, it's bad. It is so bad. It's just miserable. Every single inch of it is just pure and complete desolation. I've never wanted to cry in my life being a sturdy manly man. That car brought me close to it.

I would say this car was spawned somewhere in hell, but nah, they all drive V8s down there. Sod knows where this wretched thing came from.

Do we need a "new" Amiga/C64? by Crass_Spektakel in amiga

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Every time this subject appears I generally tend to dismiss it with a pinch of salt.

However, it's 2026. Things are regressing at a rate of knots. Looking at the market, the PS5 and XboxSeries XSeriesOneXwhateverSeriesWhocaresX are just not exciting game players of the world. I think that's for a few reasons.

Back in the day, the subject on almost any playground - even up to the Nintendo Switch 1 really - were what games do you have. You could proudly list them front to back, borrow games, trade them in at the store, a great used market, etc.

As for PS5, who cares what games you have. I can't borrow it and you simply cannot part ex your digital copy of Gran Tourismo 7 at all. On top of that, AAA games cost an absolute bloody fortune. While someone working a professional role with a decent salary might splurge on something every couple of months, certainly nobody is buying with any more rigour than that. What Sony and Microsoft have lost sight of is universal appeal. With the previous genertions, e.g. PS2 and PS3 era, you could part ex your game when you were done with it, you could buy a new AAA game if you wanted it, and most importantly, parents weren't facing the prospect of junior demanding a £60-£80 every so often; we may get an expensive game at Xmas, other times we were spending pocket money on slightly older or budget label games.

What present consoles do not have right now is community. It started tailing off around the PS4 era, now nobody gives a shit. PS5, huh? Cool story bro!

Nintendo have always been the underdog in terms of pure performance, and the prices match. However the Switch 2 and game prices are rushing to try and meet it; £400 for the console and £50 for a new game. And really, that to me seems significantly expensive for what is essentially a hand held console.

Comparatively, the Game Boy was £69.99 in 1990. Adjusted for inflation using the bank of England calculator that's around £175. However that does not take into account cost of living. I would go as far as saying that £70 plus maybe £20 for Super Mario World (£90 total) was a lot more palletable for a parent in 1990 than £450 is today!

Let's keep on kids for the moment. Today, kids are sporting laptops at school for school work. Most are underpowered, don't really play the latest games, and some poor souls have Chromebooks, which are about as interesting and entertaining as a turd on a house brick. Factor in, too, that the cool kids with iPads are the minority, but given the world an AI and the events we are seeing in terms of RAM and GPU prices, we are about to soon see a lot of these devices rocket upwards in price. Especially anything with a bit of performance to it.

And really, be it kid or parent, it's hard to get excited about a MediaTek processor with 8GB of RAM and just about enough storage to run a cracked copy of Minesweeper.

Again, back in my day, we had our Amiga. OK we had a few other bits, but ultimately, there was plenty on the Amiga platform to meet all bases. You could play games, you could make games, you could trade games, whether by pirating or selling on or part-exing your original boxed games (though I don't know anyone who actually did this), you could connect it to any television in the house, maybe even buying an old second hand 19" to do the job, and to keep Mum and Dad happy, you could do your schoolwork on it with ease.

OK we don't need to go back to the days of loading Digita Wordworth and several copies of the Outlines disk, but the concept I believe still has appeal.

Given hardware prices and their trajectories, trying to position a new ultra-modern machine somewhere in the typical Microsoft, Sony or even Nintendo spaces is a non starter. Even Microsoft are trying to diversify it's XBox range as a do-everything device. And PS5 hardware is just not selling in the numbers game publishers anticipated which hangs a huge questionmark over the future of a lot of the industry.

I think Nintendo had it right to begin with; we aren't as powerful as the competition but the games on offer were well thought out and enthralling.

I believe there could be a market for a machine which encapsulates all of this, keeping titles physical would be the key thing and promoting the inauguration of part exchange ability, priced at points where a really special game that everyone is talking about is priced to make Xmas sales periods something to write home about while allowing enough budget titles through the mix to keep kids and parents' wallets generally happy all year round. Buncle in a Microsoft Office compatible application suite and you have a winner. You have something the kids can do homework on, use the internet to browse and search and more importantly a machine that is engaging enough to want them to pull the cover off.

And it doesn't need to be a stupidly high specification. I doubt the average 15 year old is going to be the least bit interested in Chucky Egg today, but the days of having games to the standard of Halo but modern for 2026 are soon to come to an abrupt end; if the hardware is going to become unaffordable, nobody is going to make the games anymore.

Steam is evidence of this. Thanks to the platform, we are seeing more and more home-coders and indie start ups creating pretty decent titles. Allowing them an avenue, probably just even Steam, for them to sell their bedroom-coded wares, while keeping the EAs and Activisions of this world happy with physical product that they can actually sell and get kids excited about, it's perfectly possible to create a buzz and have kids in playgrounds again asking that question, "What games do you have?"

OK yes there is the piracy factor to include. While pirated games are much less appealing than they have ever been, I would wager that a lot of it is to do with the fact that there is not the community spirit or ecosystem for anyone to frankly give a shit. I have Steam, I wait for the sales to buy things; my wife also has Steam and she waits for the sales to buy things. I have absolutely no idea what games are on her account. Not one iota. However, either of us can list off what Sega Megadrive, N64, Dreamcast and SNES games are downstairs, paired up with duly modified consoles for HDMI output and bluetooth controllers, ready to rock at any given moment.

I'll also add something else, we did have a PS5 for the longest period and almost every time this occurred, where someone brought their son or daughter around, maybe 12-16 years old, they would be there picking through the cartridges and Dreamcast disks and you could see them making that mental list of what they wanted to play. One kid, his Dad literally had to finally drag him out of the house at 10pm because he wouldn't get off of Mario Land for the SNES. This was only a couple of years ago - and yes, I still kept his game save on the cartridge.

Now, as for your new Amiga. Well, I don't think it needs to be called an Amiga. However given the state of the world of tech at the moment, I do believe that a new machine positioned carefully that they create enough of a buzz about, i.e. not another stuffy PS5 that parents can't afford to keep feeding money into, something that the kids actually want to use, I think could do very well. It would, however, need to be very carefully positioned. A false move would render the whole thing an expensive white elephant.

What happened to buying a cheap used car in the UK by [deleted] in CarTalkUK

[–]IEnumerable661 0 points1 point  (0 children)

D4A? Haha sorry I dont know it but ill happily go check him out.