Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
One word: Tizen (which also derives much suck from the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries below it: "let's make an object-oriented UI library and pass everything around as void* !")
So we have no evidence that there was even an actual drone at Gatwick or Heathrow at all, and now you're suggesting that someone might make an intentionally malicious drone?
I make a point to get clamshell CD players when I find them at by-the-pound thrift stores, particularly the ones with anti-skip support. I can go to Half Price Books, sit on the floor, then start listening through the clearance CDs. (they put the discs back in the cases when they go clearance, and the clearance section is usually the bottom row of the shelves) You can find a lot of cool stuff that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and it's only 2-3 bucks each. (sometimes that much for a 2 or 3 disc set!) If I get at least one good song per dollar, I'm doing good, more than that and it's a keeper.
I sort of miss Laserdisc for that large format artwork. What I don't miss is having to store the damn things. They're the size of LP albums, but twice as thick, three times as heavy (acrylic rather than vinyl), and usually require two discs for a more than ~90 minute movie. But hearing them stop, flip the head, and reverse the motor to play the second side is awesome.
My favorite Austin record store is down by Burleson and Montopolis. It's a by-the-pound Goodwill thrift store. Sometimes they get a bit scratched up, but you never know what you'll find!
I could be wrong, but I thought a proper B&B still had the owners in the house, with the guests in common areas and a bedroom. Renting out your entire house, going a few blocks away, and not even giving it a drive-by, doesn't sound like the same thing.
How does some fresh out of school kid get to make the decisions in these companies that end up dooming them?
Because the people who don't understand subtleties of UI design and implementation get promoted to management, and end up hiring punk kids who also don't understand subtleties of UI design and implementation. Punk kids are not the people you want designing UIs anyhow, you want grumpy middle-aged perfectionists who get pissed off when they have to use bad UIs. (Note that Steve Jobs was a well-known perfectionist, and that both the Mac OS and hardware have declined in quality since his death.)
That is probably because of something UI people have known since at least 1984 with the original Macintosh, but UX millennials are clueless about: you have to always read and save the state of the modifier keys (control, shift, command, etc.) at the moment the key (or mouse) event happens, and keep it as a single object. You can't just poll it later when you feel like it, because it can change in that time. UX people also only use the fastest PCs possible, so they never have the lag that shows this problem, and will just tell you to get a faster computer. (Hint: it worked fine on an 8MHz 68000.)
One game I play a lot is built on Unity, and I'm not sure if it's part of the custom game code, or an event loop in the Unity base code (I suspect the latter), but not only does it not save modifier keys along with events, it only polls for events once per display frame! One effect of this is when dragging items, with sufficient UI processing lag and a fast enough mouse drag, the initial mouse coordinates of the drag can be on a completely different object than where the original click happened. And when the frame rate goes below 10fps or so, you can't double-click anymore, because it doesn't save the time when the event happened (something else that should be in an event object), and instead compares when the two clicks were processed. At a sufficiently low frame rate, this will always be beyond the double-click timing threshold.
The Firefox forks are already having problems with FF nuking support for anything related to add-ons from the Gecko code base and extensions web sites.
My opinion on/. beta and these other changes is it's the UX idiots (see other posts here pointing out the difference between UI and UX) making arbitrary changes to make themselves seem like they are doing something worthy of continued employment.
Not just flat fucking rectangles, but so many times a button is made with a rectangle around plain text, such that the button is about 3x as high as the text, but you have to click on the actual text for it to do anything.
I haven't had cable in years, and I barely find anything Hollywood puts out worth the effort of watching it. But I did go to one movie this year. Ready Player One was pretty good, yes the story was tinkered with, but it was like the "hundredth retelling" kind of differences, and basically it was fun. TV-wise, I haven't been keeping up my DVR stuff from the antenna the past few months. I've been two weeks behind on Jeopardy for a while, and three weeks now.
The Orville was maybe the best thing "this" year (actually it was the end of 2017, right?) and I'm looking forward to its return Sunday night. It turned out better than I expected from the original promos. I suspect they pitched the "Married with Crew" angle to sucker Fox into taking it, then quickly it turned into STTNG with snark turned up to 11. There was also a Fox show called "Ghosted" that I had fun watching, and I think there's still a few episodes I haven't watched yet. Star Trek Discovery (STD) can die in a fire. I watched the first "episode" that CBS grudgingly broadcast, and it was just plain bad.
Young Sheldon is good, and I got some '80s nostalgia from it. (It takes place in the late '80s, but it presumably takes culture a while to reach rural East Texas, so it feels more like the early '80s.) I grew up as a brainy kid in rural areas in the '70s, so I can relate. Oh yeah, and Brooklyn Nine Nine is back!
I haven't been watching anime for a few months, and I can only remember what I did watch this year because it's in a folder where I can sort by date. Isekai Izakaya, Pop Team Epic, and on the cute side, Hakumei to Mikochi, Card Captor Sakura Clear Card, and Mitsuboshi Colors.
...or Mount Everest. I think that this whole "live on Mars" thing is a bit more rushed that it probably needs to be, but it's not unlike having scientists at an Antarctica station in the winter, only they have to stay longer and it's farther away. While a lunar and a Martian base have a lot of differing situations (nasty static dust, long hot days/cold nights, zero atmosphere, takes a few days to get there, vs planet-wide dust storms, cold days/colder nights, takes six to eighteen months to get there or back), the thing they have in common is zero infrastructure. At least with a lunar base we can get an idea of the sorts of things they'll need, without being stuck months away from even Amazon Prime delivery. And we've also been doing this with remote stations on Earth to get ready for that.
Probably because VGA had a "chunky" pixel mode where each pixel was a single byte, instead of being split into multiple bit planes. Fine if you're using the blitter to move around graphics that have already been rendered into a planar mode, but horrible if the CPU has to write to each plane with separate memory accesses, both in the need for multiple accesses, and the chance of the screen showing artifacts due to partially-updated pixels. I never understood the point of having planar video memory.
Wasn't the end for SGI when consumer 3D graphics cards happened? Sure, they "cheat" compared to the graphics methods that SGI used, but games needed real-time 3D graphics, not render farm stuff, so if there was a way to do it cheaper and faster, it was going to happen... and did. Other than the 3D it was the typical high-end Unix workstation stuff that got killed off by NT and Linux, along with all the other high-end Unix workstations like Sun, Apollo, etc.
The only way Apple was selling: Adobe and some other publishing product I forget the name of.
LaserWriter, perhaps?
AppleTalk networking and file sharing in the late '80s put them way ahead of the rest of the world in that realm. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but the "Macintosh Office" meant that it was worth getting two or more Macs to share an expensive (and very nice) printer. You also didn't need to buy an expensive file server software or hardware, there was one called "TOPS" which was very popular. But if you got two Amigas, how were you going to share your documents and printers? SneakerNet and a switch box?
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, steam is "external combustion". That's because the combustion happens external to the bits that move. See that firebox on the side?
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
One word: Tizen (which also derives much suck from the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries below it: "let's make an object-oriented UI library and pass everything around as void* !")
but since they still have no idea who was using the drones at Gatwick
We still have no idea what kind of drones they were, or even if they were drones at all, and nothing more than hysterical UFO reports.
So we have no evidence that there was even an actual drone at Gatwick or Heathrow at all, and now you're suggesting that someone might make an intentionally malicious drone?
It will go away when the hipsters finally discover cheap used CDs. Until then, I will partake of them without their competition.
I make a point to get clamshell CD players when I find them at by-the-pound thrift stores, particularly the ones with anti-skip support. I can go to Half Price Books, sit on the floor, then start listening through the clearance CDs. (they put the discs back in the cases when they go clearance, and the clearance section is usually the bottom row of the shelves) You can find a lot of cool stuff that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and it's only 2-3 bucks each. (sometimes that much for a 2 or 3 disc set!) If I get at least one good song per dollar, I'm doing good, more than that and it's a keeper.
I sort of miss Laserdisc for that large format artwork. What I don't miss is having to store the damn things. They're the size of LP albums, but twice as thick, three times as heavy (acrylic rather than vinyl), and usually require two discs for a more than ~90 minute movie. But hearing them stop, flip the head, and reverse the motor to play the second side is awesome.
My favorite Austin record store is down by Burleson and Montopolis. It's a by-the-pound Goodwill thrift store. Sometimes they get a bit scratched up, but you never know what you'll find!
I could be wrong, but I thought a proper B&B still had the owners in the house, with the guests in common areas and a bedroom. Renting out your entire house, going a few blocks away, and not even giving it a drive-by, doesn't sound like the same thing.
When they un-linked G+ from YouTube? When they killed G+ completely?
with the intent of causing users to talk to their browser
Well I certainly talk to my phone all the time. The usual words are "Fucking Google!" and "What the fuck, Google?"
How does some fresh out of school kid get to make the decisions in these companies that end up dooming them?
Because the people who don't understand subtleties of UI design and implementation get promoted to management, and end up hiring punk kids who also don't understand subtleties of UI design and implementation. Punk kids are not the people you want designing UIs anyhow, you want grumpy middle-aged perfectionists who get pissed off when they have to use bad UIs. (Note that Steve Jobs was a well-known perfectionist, and that both the Mac OS and hardware have declined in quality since his death.)
That is probably because of something UI people have known since at least 1984 with the original Macintosh, but UX millennials are clueless about: you have to always read and save the state of the modifier keys (control, shift, command, etc.) at the moment the key (or mouse) event happens, and keep it as a single object. You can't just poll it later when you feel like it, because it can change in that time. UX people also only use the fastest PCs possible, so they never have the lag that shows this problem, and will just tell you to get a faster computer. (Hint: it worked fine on an 8MHz 68000.)
One game I play a lot is built on Unity, and I'm not sure if it's part of the custom game code, or an event loop in the Unity base code (I suspect the latter), but not only does it not save modifier keys along with events, it only polls for events once per display frame! One effect of this is when dragging items, with sufficient UI processing lag and a fast enough mouse drag, the initial mouse coordinates of the drag can be on a completely different object than where the original click happened. And when the frame rate goes below 10fps or so, you can't double-click anymore, because it doesn't save the time when the event happened (something else that should be in an event object), and instead compares when the two clicks were processed. At a sufficiently low frame rate, this will always be beyond the double-click timing threshold.
The Firefox forks are already having problems with FF nuking support for anything related to add-ons from the Gecko code base and extensions web sites.
My opinion on /. beta and these other changes is it's the UX idiots (see other posts here pointing out the difference between UI and UX) making arbitrary changes to make themselves seem like they are doing something worthy of continued employment.
Not just flat fucking rectangles, but so many times a button is made with a rectangle around plain text, such that the button is about 3x as high as the text, but you have to click on the actual text for it to do anything.
...until late next year when Firefox decides to copy Chrome again.
I haven't had cable in years, and I barely find anything Hollywood puts out worth the effort of watching it. But I did go to one movie this year. Ready Player One was pretty good, yes the story was tinkered with, but it was like the "hundredth retelling" kind of differences, and basically it was fun. TV-wise, I haven't been keeping up my DVR stuff from the antenna the past few months. I've been two weeks behind on Jeopardy for a while, and three weeks now.
The Orville was maybe the best thing "this" year (actually it was the end of 2017, right?) and I'm looking forward to its return Sunday night. It turned out better than I expected from the original promos. I suspect they pitched the "Married with Crew" angle to sucker Fox into taking it, then quickly it turned into STTNG with snark turned up to 11. There was also a Fox show called "Ghosted" that I had fun watching, and I think there's still a few episodes I haven't watched yet. Star Trek Discovery (STD) can die in a fire. I watched the first "episode" that CBS grudgingly broadcast, and it was just plain bad.
Young Sheldon is good, and I got some '80s nostalgia from it. (It takes place in the late '80s, but it presumably takes culture a while to reach rural East Texas, so it feels more like the early '80s.) I grew up as a brainy kid in rural areas in the '70s, so I can relate. Oh yeah, and Brooklyn Nine Nine is back!
I haven't been watching anime for a few months, and I can only remember what I did watch this year because it's in a folder where I can sort by date. Isekai Izakaya, Pop Team Epic, and on the cute side, Hakumei to Mikochi, Card Captor Sakura Clear Card, and Mitsuboshi Colors.
...or Mount Everest. I think that this whole "live on Mars" thing is a bit more rushed that it probably needs to be, but it's not unlike having scientists at an Antarctica station in the winter, only they have to stay longer and it's farther away. While a lunar and a Martian base have a lot of differing situations (nasty static dust, long hot days/cold nights, zero atmosphere, takes a few days to get there, vs planet-wide dust storms, cold days/colder nights, takes six to eighteen months to get there or back), the thing they have in common is zero infrastructure. At least with a lunar base we can get an idea of the sorts of things they'll need, without being stuck months away from even Amazon Prime delivery. And we've also been doing this with remote stations on Earth to get ready for that.
You should have tried a large helium balloon, no scary buzz and it's completely tethered!
Don't forget the annular eclipse a few months before. I live near where both paths intersect, so it's going to be my "practice run" for the big one.
Probably because VGA had a "chunky" pixel mode where each pixel was a single byte, instead of being split into multiple bit planes. Fine if you're using the blitter to move around graphics that have already been rendered into a planar mode, but horrible if the CPU has to write to each plane with separate memory accesses, both in the need for multiple accesses, and the chance of the screen showing artifacts due to partially-updated pixels. I never understood the point of having planar video memory.
Wasn't the end for SGI when consumer 3D graphics cards happened? Sure, they "cheat" compared to the graphics methods that SGI used, but games needed real-time 3D graphics, not render farm stuff, so if there was a way to do it cheaper and faster, it was going to happen... and did. Other than the 3D it was the typical high-end Unix workstation stuff that got killed off by NT and Linux, along with all the other high-end Unix workstations like Sun, Apollo, etc.
The only way Apple was selling: Adobe and some other publishing product I forget the name of.
LaserWriter, perhaps?
AppleTalk networking and file sharing in the late '80s put them way ahead of the rest of the world in that realm. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but the "Macintosh Office" meant that it was worth getting two or more Macs to share an expensive (and very nice) printer. You also didn't need to buy an expensive file server software or hardware, there was one called "TOPS" which was very popular. But if you got two Amigas, how were you going to share your documents and printers? SneakerNet and a switch box?