minecraft site:de - 14600 results minecraft site:uk - 4080 results minecraft site:pl - 3170 results minecraft site:ru - 2950 results minecraft site:fr - 1250 results minecraft site:es - 951 results (naturally, not all results pertain to the game itself)
It's not very popular in Europe, in general. It has nothing to do with living under a rock - the alleged popularity, from what I've seen here, only seems to be limited to the USA.
If you haven't heard of it, you're living beneath a very, very large rock.
Actually, I'm from Europe, and I'm way past my teens, so I'm probably out of touch with these new-fangled viral things. Still, nobody I know ever mentioned it. I guess I don't hang around young gamers.
Sixty thousand people have bought the game since May 2009, not in the last two weeks.
No... The dev says on his blog that he withdraws the money every week, and the 600.000 EUR (which is a REALLY BIG sum!!!) got accumulated since they froze his account.
If you were PayPal, and you had this account with money slowly tricking in, then suddenly massively spiking (and a fair share of those is going to be with stolen or fake cards, as usual), wouldn't it sound a red alert for you?
I've just googled the game on my country's TLD. There's about 20 results, more than half of which are hacked Joomla spam, and there seem to be two forum threads with a total of 30 posts or so. It's no wonder that I haven't heard about it...
On the 25th, they limited my account for unspecified reasons (a suspicious withdrawal or deposit!......... [edit:] Just to clear things up: I withdraw everything from paypal every week. They limited my account just as sales started spiking, so this money has accumulated since they limited the account.
SIXTY THOUSAND PEOPLE BOUGHT AN UNKNOWN GAME, WHICH IS IN *ALPHA*, IN JUST TWO WEEKS?????
I go to the game's homepage, and I see a video about rollercoasters, and not gameplay.
I browse around the site, nothing. The only, ONLY description of the game is, I quote, "Minecraft is a game about placing blocks while running from skeletons. Or something like that..", followed by the rollercoaster video, and then "The game is a lot like that, but also has enemies and cave exploring and mining and farming and flowing water and dynamic lighting and a huge (huge) randomly generated world map."
Yeah, thanks. I've never heard of Minecraft before, and I'd guess that few people have. So what is it - a rollercoaster game with zombies and farming?!
Anyway...
The pre-purchase page says "If you pre-purchase now during alpha, you pay just 9.95!"
If we round it to 10 EUR, 600k is sixty thousand people paying for something that is basically entirely unknown and isn't even described on the website.
And PayPal freezes the money? Gee, what a surprise.
You obviously don't ride public transport then. A HUGE advantage of tablets over netbooks for people that do is that you can actually use the tablet standing up
Sounds perfect for pickpockets. "Hey, I'm paying attention to my electronic gizmo and both of my hands are occupied, so one isn't resting on my wallet pocket!"
Wide gamut would be great *IF* there were more than 8 bits per channel, but there aren't.
Imagine that you have a monitor that covers 4975396134% of NTSC. Pure red on such a monitor is eye-scorchingly red; in fact, it's so red that Satan himself enjoys it. 0 is lack of red, 255 is unbelievably red, as mentioned.
To get what's currently pure red on a sRGB monitor, you need to pick the value of 1. Everything above 1 is "too red".
So, you're stuck with 0 on your 10984081% gamut monitor for current sRGB red values of 0..127 and 1 for current values of 128..255.
You have lost dynamic range.
Once we get 10 or 12-bit processing paths - bring it on. Just not right now.
Also, it used an entirely different (and commercially non-viable) method of backlighting. You get serious blooming issues when you can only turn off a quadrant of many LED panels instead of individual ones.
Go have a look at NEC's spectraview series of monitors, or the high end monitors from Eizo and you'll never miss your old CRT again. These monitors have wide gamuts, perfect viewing angles, and internal colour lookup tables to ensure the data displayed is simply right.
Wide gamut is BAD. You DO NOT WANT wide gamut, as it fucks up the colours really bad and lowers the dynamic range.
This is yet another victory for marketing. Somehow they've managed to convince people that wide gamut is a good thing, when it's just about the worst thing ever to have happened to display tech...
I just bought a 22" LED-backlit panel and the blacks are very black.
Only because your monitor is cheating and turning off the edge LEDs completely when it detects a black screen.
Try this: open your image editing program, create a fully black images, and add a couple of white pixels to it. Then display it full screen and see what happens. There are two possible scenarios:
1) You find out that your blacks aren't as black as you thought 2) The monitor decides to disregard those white pixels and turn off the LEDs anyway
Not entirely true. LED backlights are controllable and switch off in banks. This is significant because the backlighting can turn off in areas where there is very dark "black", increasing the contrast ratio quite a bit. With a CCFL backlight it is always on, so you have a backlight bleeding through the dark areas on-screen.
Yes and no.
As far as I know, there isn't a single computer monitor that allows local area dimming, as LEDs are scattered around the edge of the panel and a diffuser takes care of distributing the brightness around the entire surface of the panel (which, coincidentally, allows for just as bad "backlight bleeding" as is the case with CCFLs).
There likely won't be such monitors, either, for two reasons:
1) The LEDs come on small panels which are attached together. They might come from different batches, which also means they might have slightly different colour temperature and brightness. On a TV, that is acceptable and you won't really notice it. On a computer display, it would drive you insane very quickly. Imagine a solid grey background that is actually a bit yellowish up there and over there, a bit pinkish right there, and tints to green on those three areas. QC might handle that, but you'd have to pay through your nose for it.
2) Blooming. Imagine three LED-backlit quadrants; the left is entirely black (and gets turned off), the middle contains your terminal window and is mostly black, except for bright text (so the quadrant is fully on), and the right one is just like the left. You will be looking at black-grey-black, and not only that, but light from the central quadrant will bloom over to the neighbouring ones. This is already an issue on some TVs when they display static content that usually comes from a computer or a console. While you can really dim the quadrant and not turn it off entirely, that is again something that mostly only works on TV material, which contains much less localized high-contrast areas, and tends to display dynamic content.
Look at your screen right now. Imagine it's divided into a 4x3 grid. Which quadrants could you turn off, if any? Which ones could you partially dim? If your desktop is anything like mine, the answer is "none of them".
There is no such thing as a "LED screen". What you are talking about is LED-backlit LCD panels. They pretty much do nothing important compared to regular CCFL backlighting, apart from having somewhat lower power consumption and more correct colour temperature. Everything else is more or less the same, including the black level and the contrast.
It's only good enough for most people because they haven't seen better. Case in point: TN panels. If you've never seen an IPS, you have no idea that vertical gamma shift and low colour reproduction aren't normal. If you've never seen a CRT or a plasma, as is the case with newer generations, you have no idea that the gray background, instead of black, isn't normal.
Thankfully, IPS panels have come down in price so they are affordable, but the black level is still waaaaaaaaay over what classic phosphor display tech gives you. I've had my LCD for a year, and I still get pissed off by the damn thing glowing grey when the screen saver kicks in.
mp3 usually *is* good enough, and most of the time you can't discern it from the original if it has a high bitrate, but that isn't the case with something like LCD vs. SED; it would be more like 64 kbps compared to lossless audio.
OLED is our only hope for quality displays now, and it's not progressing as fast as it should.
That greatly depends on your specific application. I can tell you that installing an SSD in my work laptop was the single greatest (relative) performance jump I've ever seen, starting with my 8086/1MB/CGA machine until the present day, including all processor/memory/graphics upgrades I've ever done.
Yup - it depends.
For the majority of users, the SSD doesn't provide such great an advantage. They turn on their computer and start their browser and... That's it. It all runs just as fast from there on, regardless of the drive technology used.
On the other hand, I recently got an X25 inside my work PC, and that thing just brought it to life compared to the old spinning Seagate.
At home I don't need an SSD. I turn on my PC and start my browser and... You get the drill. It would be a complete waste of money and wouldn't give me any noticeable performance improvements.
I was fine all throughout primary and secondary school, but since coming to college I've noticed that I feel physically sick in the lectures, it was enough to make me stop attending lectures almost entirely (maybe I'll do better next year).
Could have been the lighting.
Some people are extremely sensitive to (C)CFLs, especially if they have a low CRI or a cold colour temperature. One of the lecture halls at college kept giving me headaches when I attended in the evening; then again, I knew it was the ceiling lamps, because I've had such issues in a couple of other CFL-lit areas in the past.
That's the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The core problem with it is that it relies on the assumption that an OS and it's respective applications will break horribly at anything other than 96 DPI. While this is true on Windows (and indeed would make running Windows on a 200 DPI screen a prescription for eye strain), it is a Windows-only problem.
Sort of. Windows can lie about DPI and scale everything up, so that interface layouts don't break like they used to in the past. Se7en improved it by a lot, but it's still not good enough and requires a ton of work from application developers.
The start menu looks fine, because Seven comes with 128x128 icons for everything, if I'm not mistaken. However, take a close look at Wordpad - the toolbar icons and the zoom on the bottom.
It gets much worse for legacy apps. For example, this:
Vista and Windows 7 already have all the functionality you're asking for: on a high-resolution screen old applications get a false legacy DPI value and their output is scaled by Windows, and new applications can request to turn that functionality off and work on the real high-resolution DPI.
Have you seen how those scaled apps look?
I'll tell you: they look like blurry shit. I've covered that in the parent post.
By "new apps" you mean those written in WPF, and, well, so far I've only seen one - a savegame editor for FM2009. Strangely enough, that one *also* looked like blurry shit, with horrible font rendering (at least on my XP box).
Slashdot Mirror
This is why things show up in Google days, sometimes weeks ahead of the other search engines.
For a hands-on example of what icebike is saying, look here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22This+is+why+things+show+up+in+Google+days%2C+sometimes+weeks+ahead+of+the+other+search+engines%22
Actually, Google will index Slashdot comments in a matter of minutes.
minecraft site:de - 14600 results
minecraft site:uk - 4080 results
minecraft site:pl - 3170 results
minecraft site:ru - 2950 results
minecraft site:fr - 1250 results
minecraft site:es - 951 results
(naturally, not all results pertain to the game itself)
It's not very popular in Europe, in general. It has nothing to do with living under a rock - the alleged popularity, from what I've seen here, only seems to be limited to the USA.
If you haven't heard of it, you're living beneath a very, very large rock.
Actually, I'm from Europe, and I'm way past my teens, so I'm probably out of touch with these new-fangled viral things. Still, nobody I know ever mentioned it. I guess I don't hang around young gamers.
Sixty thousand people have bought the game since May 2009, not in the last two weeks.
No... The dev says on his blog that he withdraws the money every week, and the 600.000 EUR (which is a REALLY BIG sum!!!) got accumulated since they froze his account.
If you were PayPal, and you had this account with money slowly tricking in, then suddenly massively spiking (and a fair share of those is going to be with stolen or fake cards, as usual), wouldn't it sound a red alert for you?
I've just googled the game on my country's TLD. There's about 20 results, more than half of which are hacked Joomla spam, and there seem to be two forum threads with a total of 30 posts or so. It's no wonder that I haven't heard about it...
That explains the spike, thanks.
Still don't see why anyone would pay for that (especially since it requires Java), but that's probably just my problem.
Sorry - the website and the game's presentation are so shitty that I jumped to conclusions and thought the game was in alpha stage.
In any case, I've never heard of it, and I've never even heard others talk about the game... And I've even played Iji.
Sixty thousand purchases in two weeks is still very weird, and it's no wonder that PayPal froze the money.
Unfortunately, I have to reply to myself.
From the developer's blog at http://notch.tumblr.com/ :
On the 25th, they limited my account for unspecified reasons (a suspicious withdrawal or deposit! ......... [edit:] Just to clear things up: I withdraw everything from paypal every week. They limited my account just as sales started spiking, so this money has accumulated since they limited the account.
SIXTY THOUSAND PEOPLE BOUGHT AN UNKNOWN GAME, WHICH IS IN *ALPHA*, IN JUST TWO WEEKS?????
I call serious bullshit on this whole thing.
I go to the game's homepage, and I see a video about rollercoasters, and not gameplay.
I browse around the site, nothing. The only, ONLY description of the game is, I quote, "Minecraft is a game about placing blocks while running from skeletons. Or something like that..", followed by the rollercoaster video, and then "The game is a lot like that, but also has enemies and cave exploring and mining and farming and flowing water and dynamic lighting and a huge (huge) randomly generated world map."
Yeah, thanks. I've never heard of Minecraft before, and I'd guess that few people have. So what is it - a rollercoaster game with zombies and farming?!
Anyway...
The pre-purchase page says "If you pre-purchase now during alpha, you pay just 9.95!"
If we round it to 10 EUR, 600k is sixty thousand people paying for something that is basically entirely unknown and isn't even described on the website.
And PayPal freezes the money? Gee, what a surprise.
You obviously don't ride public transport then. A HUGE advantage of tablets over netbooks for people that do is that you can actually use the tablet standing up
Sounds perfect for pickpockets. "Hey, I'm paying attention to my electronic gizmo and both of my hands are occupied, so one isn't resting on my wallet pocket!"
Don't do that. You'll get robbed.
Oh yes, wide gamut TN panels do exist... They should be classified as an atrocity against mankind :(
Give me the model name of your monitor, and I'll find out what its black point is when calibrated to the standard 120 cd/m2.
You don't understand how it works.
Wide gamut would be great *IF* there were more than 8 bits per channel, but there aren't.
Imagine that you have a monitor that covers 4975396134% of NTSC. Pure red on such a monitor is eye-scorchingly red; in fact, it's so red that Satan himself enjoys it. 0 is lack of red, 255 is unbelievably red, as mentioned.
To get what's currently pure red on a sRGB monitor, you need to pick the value of 1. Everything above 1 is "too red".
So, you're stuck with 0 on your 10984081% gamut monitor for current sRGB red values of 0..127 and 1 for current values of 128..255.
You have lost dynamic range.
Once we get 10 or 12-bit processing paths - bring it on. Just not right now.
That's a prototype, it doesn't count ;)
Also, it used an entirely different (and commercially non-viable) method of backlighting. You get serious blooming issues when you can only turn off a quadrant of many LED panels instead of individual ones.
Are you too scared to try what I said? ;)
Or maybe your other monitor is a piece of crap?
Go have a look at NEC's spectraview series of monitors, or the high end monitors from Eizo and you'll never miss your old CRT again. These monitors have wide gamuts, perfect viewing angles, and internal colour lookup tables to ensure the data displayed is simply right.
Wide gamut is BAD. You DO NOT WANT wide gamut, as it fucks up the colours really bad and lowers the dynamic range.
This is yet another victory for marketing. Somehow they've managed to convince people that wide gamut is a good thing, when it's just about the worst thing ever to have happened to display tech...
I just bought a 22" LED-backlit panel and the blacks are very black.
Only because your monitor is cheating and turning off the edge LEDs completely when it detects a black screen.
Try this: open your image editing program, create a fully black images, and add a couple of white pixels to it. Then display it full screen and see what happens. There are two possible scenarios:
1) You find out that your blacks aren't as black as you thought
2) The monitor decides to disregard those white pixels and turn off the LEDs anyway
Not entirely true. LED backlights are controllable and switch off in banks. This is significant because the backlighting can turn off in areas where there is very dark "black", increasing the contrast ratio quite a bit. With a CCFL backlight it is always on, so you have a backlight bleeding through the dark areas on-screen.
Yes and no.
As far as I know, there isn't a single computer monitor that allows local area dimming, as LEDs are scattered around the edge of the panel and a diffuser takes care of distributing the brightness around the entire surface of the panel (which, coincidentally, allows for just as bad "backlight bleeding" as is the case with CCFLs).
There likely won't be such monitors, either, for two reasons:
1) The LEDs come on small panels which are attached together. They might come from different batches, which also means they might have slightly different colour temperature and brightness. On a TV, that is acceptable and you won't really notice it. On a computer display, it would drive you insane very quickly. Imagine a solid grey background that is actually a bit yellowish up there and over there, a bit pinkish right there, and tints to green on those three areas. QC might handle that, but you'd have to pay through your nose for it.
2) Blooming. Imagine three LED-backlit quadrants; the left is entirely black (and gets turned off), the middle contains your terminal window and is mostly black, except for bright text (so the quadrant is fully on), and the right one is just like the left. You will be looking at black-grey-black, and not only that, but light from the central quadrant will bloom over to the neighbouring ones. This is already an issue on some TVs when they display static content that usually comes from a computer or a console. While you can really dim the quadrant and not turn it off entirely, that is again something that mostly only works on TV material, which contains much less localized high-contrast areas, and tends to display dynamic content.
Look at your screen right now. Imagine it's divided into a 4x3 grid. Which quadrants could you turn off, if any? Which ones could you partially dim? If your desktop is anything like mine, the answer is "none of them".
There is no such thing as a "LED screen". What you are talking about is LED-backlit LCD panels. They pretty much do nothing important compared to regular CCFL backlighting, apart from having somewhat lower power consumption and more correct colour temperature. Everything else is more or less the same, including the black level and the contrast.
It's only good enough for most people because they haven't seen better. Case in point: TN panels. If you've never seen an IPS, you have no idea that vertical gamma shift and low colour reproduction aren't normal. If you've never seen a CRT or a plasma, as is the case with newer generations, you have no idea that the gray background, instead of black, isn't normal.
Thankfully, IPS panels have come down in price so they are affordable, but the black level is still waaaaaaaaay over what classic phosphor display tech gives you. I've had my LCD for a year, and I still get pissed off by the damn thing glowing grey when the screen saver kicks in.
mp3 usually *is* good enough, and most of the time you can't discern it from the original if it has a high bitrate, but that isn't the case with something like LCD vs. SED; it would be more like 64 kbps compared to lossless audio.
OLED is our only hope for quality displays now, and it's not progressing as fast as it should.
Let us pray that big OLED screens with enough longevity become a reality in a couple of years, because the LCD tech just isn't that good.
This is bad news... Very, very bad news.
That greatly depends on your specific application. I can tell you that installing an SSD in my work laptop was the single greatest (relative) performance jump I've ever seen, starting with my 8086/1MB/CGA machine until the present day, including all processor/memory/graphics upgrades I've ever done.
Yup - it depends.
For the majority of users, the SSD doesn't provide such great an advantage. They turn on their computer and start their browser and... That's it. It all runs just as fast from there on, regardless of the drive technology used.
On the other hand, I recently got an X25 inside my work PC, and that thing just brought it to life compared to the old spinning Seagate.
At home I don't need an SSD. I turn on my PC and start my browser and... You get the drill. It would be a complete waste of money and wouldn't give me any noticeable performance improvements.
I was fine all throughout primary and secondary school, but since coming to college I've noticed that I feel physically sick in the lectures, it was enough to make me stop attending lectures almost entirely (maybe I'll do better next year).
Could have been the lighting.
Some people are extremely sensitive to (C)CFLs, especially if they have a low CRI or a cold colour temperature. One of the lecture halls at college kept giving me headaches when I attended in the evening; then again, I knew it was the ceiling lamps, because I've had such issues in a couple of other CFL-lit areas in the past.
Here's a story with video and more information:
http://www.globallethbridge.com/Vaughan+gets+driving+after+online+post+about+speeding/3381185/story.html
His mother had no clue. Why doesn't that surprise me?
BTW, he actually wrecked his car a few days after starting that thread.
That's the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The core problem with it is that it relies on the assumption that an OS and it's respective applications will break horribly at anything other than 96 DPI. While this is true on Windows (and indeed would make running Windows on a 200 DPI screen a prescription for eye strain), it is a Windows-only problem.
Sort of. Windows can lie about DPI and scale everything up, so that interface layouts don't break like they used to in the past. Se7en improved it by a lot, but it's still not good enough and requires a ton of work from application developers.
You can end up with this:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/120.png
The start menu looks fine, because Seven comes with 128x128 icons for everything, if I'm not mistaken. However, take a close look at Wordpad - the toolbar icons and the zoom on the bottom.
It gets much worse for legacy apps. For example, this:
DPI virtualization: http://a.imagehost.org/0342/SS-2010-05-15_01_14_47.png
XP-mode scaling: http://h.imagehost.org/0718/SS-2010-05-15_01_18_02.png
The first one looks like blurry shit (as I've said before), and the second one breaks the layout.
Font scaling and image scaling are solved problems, get with the times.
As you can see above, it's *not* a solved problem.
Vista and Windows 7 already have all the functionality you're asking for: on a high-resolution screen old applications get a false legacy DPI value and their output is scaled by Windows, and new applications can request to turn that functionality off and work on the real high-resolution DPI.
Have you seen how those scaled apps look?
I'll tell you: they look like blurry shit. I've covered that in the parent post.
By "new apps" you mean those written in WPF, and, well, so far I've only seen one - a savegame editor for FM2009. Strangely enough, that one *also* looked like blurry shit, with horrible font rendering (at least on my XP box).