Colors have a lot to do with how people perceive things, so it doesn't sound too far fetched to say that some colors could be perceived as "cheap". I doubt there's really a chart per se, but here's one example showing some perceptions of some colors: http://daddu.net/the-power-of-colors. The overall design of something can certainly add a lot to perception as well, and even if a color is perceived as "cheap" the exact shade used, it's context, or quantity used can greatly override that. And just because purple used to be reserved for royalty doesn't mean that is still so; usage and perceptions can change over time.
No, people can purchase items once the site is back up, and I would agree that the number provided isn't accurate. But it may have still cost a lot of sales; some people will not go back to the site once it is up. They may buy from another site that is up (I've done this before when a retail site was down), go to a brick and mortar store, or just forget to go back later because what they were looking for wasn't terribly important.
Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
What happens when the iPhone 6 comes out with a screen the same size as the 5, but with a higher resolution? What if they have plans for an as yet unannounced version of the iPad that also uses that aspect ratio, but being much larger has a higher resolution? iOS is being used in a lot of devices with probably more variety to come; resolution independent positioning still makes sense even if you have to take a few extra aspect ratios into account now.
(Speaking as a man with a foreskin, who can't quite imagine what it would be like not to have one... uncomfortable?)
I am circumcised; it is EXTREMELY uncomfortable; at some times almost painful. I frequently find it very depressing and can't even come close to imagining how good it would feel to not have had this happen.
I'm going to go with NOT OK still, even if 100% collected goes straight to the artists. I'm fine with artists getting paid, but this is getting really out of hand (especially the dancing clause mentioned! Seriously?!). I'm ok with artists getting paid when they sell a CD or a download (whatever their contract works out to for that), I don't care so much that this goes on for long time after the recording is made, they should get paid for live performances, probably even for commercial use such as in a movie or tv show, but I see no reason they need to get paid for every single playing of the song - this seems completely unreasonable to me and appears as nothing more than a greedy money grab that does little other than make me annoyed. The DJ bought the song/album, that's it; he should be able to play it whenever for whomever after that, the whole "public performance" thing is pretty much bullshit to begin with. My no-name cover band should be able to perform it without paying fees, and so on...The ridiculous ways they're trying to scrounge up every last penny is really getting to be tiresome (ok, never mind getting to be....is)
software piracy is software piracy... if it were a real problem for Microsoft and the other companies, then they'd implement proper locks on the software,
Implement proper locks?! And how do you do that? Normally I keep reading comments here about how DRM is always destined to fail, which so far is true as far as I know. And they seem to be trying, such as Ubi's always available internet connection, Microsoft's online activation and 'trusted computing', and others that people have complained about. How do you implement a proper lock on software while making the experience decent enough for the user to use your software yet effective at preventing copying (heck, even screwing the user, how do you implement uncrackable copy protection? Remember, it just takes one person to get past it, the vast majority of people don't need to be that smart to pirate...) You may be right about the love/hate relationship with pirating to avoid people from using the competition, but implementing copy protection that works isn't exactly a trivial task.
Actually, they shouldn't be on the list. They both have limits to the number of hours they can work to prevent fatigue on the job. Here's an article that mentions some of the requirements.
This may depend on your specific company or situation. I get the impression our upper management likes the cloud so when things go wrong they can blame someone else (even if only partially). When we were doing things in house, it didn't matter who actually screwed up, ultimately management took the blame. With the cloud, they can now point fingers at someone else and hold up a contract stating this wouldn't happen. We're a company that's still just small enough that we are pretty much always understaffed and don't put enough money into hardware to have proper redundancies so things will go wrong eventually; since moving to the cloud, management can not only point blame elsewhere (it wasn't my people who caused the outage!) but can try (usually successfully) to get some discount or other compensation from the provider when downtime occurs.
In the end I've found the move to have pros and cons. The pros are that we simply never had the hardware infrastructure to provide the uptime requested of us (yet we were denied budget to build said infrastructure). In theory, our cloud providers can provide that uptime (or so our contract says). Development of our sites has been a nightmare though, the environment seems to lend itself to easily creating all sorts of spaghetti code (not sure yet if that is our relative unfamiliarity with the environment and/or lack of skill from the company we outsourced some of the work to, etc). Really I prefer keeping things in house for more control and flexibility, but I'm outnumbered with that opinion and that definitely isn't the way things are going (at least for us).
A better answer to your question is that the Mark Bretherton (CEO) expresses a reluctance to "upgrade" to digital until digital at least matches the quality of 70mm.
It says he's CEO at IMAX Theatre Sydney, the CEO of Imax Corporation is Richard Gelfond (according to Wikipedia). I'm not entirely sure what that means, is that CEO of an Australian division of Imax, or did they mean that theaters general manager or something similar? I'm glad at least at this location they're keeping 15/70 film, but as a whole Imax has really been in a rush to replace film with digital on screens that are far too big for the 2k resolution of the projectors they use.
The silver is only important for 3D; it is reflective enough to better maintain the polarization so the 3D image has less ghosting. For normal 2D images though, silver is a little too reflective; depending on how the screen is curved and where you are sitting it tends to create hotspots in the image instead of appearing more uniform. Personally I find silver screens look awful, there are good reasons theaters don't normally use them (except for 3D processes like RealD).
I have a hard time believing it's true, but it's damned impressive if it is. Best CGI ever.
There's no motion, just still photos, though. Still impressive, but I think realism with people is a lot easier to achieve when you don't have to also recreate all of the nuances of movement.
Small correction, the 2011 Solar Decathlon was held in West Potomac Park and not the National Mall (previous years were on the National Mall). This will be the last year it is held in the D.C. area apparently.
This is actually due to the fact that Sony digital projectors are so locked down with DRM that even changing the lens requires all kinds of password checks (which can potentially lock the camera down if not done correctly).
1) Camera?! er, not quite...that would be projector.
2) Why is this a DRM issue? It sounds like a (really bad) implementation issue. All the other projector models still have to deal with the same DRM (Hollywood is notoriously twitchy about this and there is no additional DRM on the Sony projectors that I've heard about...), but they don't have this issue when switching between 2D/3D films. The Sony 4K with Real D setup just isn't designed well from a usability point of view, and many modern multiplexes have shown they can screw up even the most basic of things.
Also, it doesn't help that Real D needs a silver screen; that's a whole new source of image degradation that would be nice to do without (that's not unique to Sony).
Better graphics, better sound, and so simple even an idiot could make it work (standard hardware == console level simplicity == plug'n'play).
Sort of, but ever try running Amiga emulators? There's a lot of options! And many games simply won't work with defaults; in the emulated world I have found it to be every bit as complicated as DOSBox. It seems like DOSBox simplifies the DOS experience while WinUAE complicates the Amiga experience.
For the era 1985 to 95, almost every game looks and plays better Via the Amiga version.
Not quite true; Amiga was typically better in the mid 80's, but that changed long before 1995, especially once VGA became available in 1987 and not long after sound cards started beating out the Amiga's internal sound; Amiga had the advantage at first but it didn't really keep up. It really depends on the developer/game; some developers did a miserable job porting to other platforms, leaving the PC or Amiga version well below what the platform could do. It also depended what PC you had, some games could be much better than Amiga or much worse than Amiga depending on the specific configuration being used.
Remember how different the Mac and Windows versions of IE were back when both existed? Even if they did release a Mac version (which I think it's safe to say they won't bother doing) I'm not sure I would trust that each work the same and would still want to test both of them individually.
It may! It did for our forums at least. We used to allow anonymous access and started getting a lot of spam. After requiring authentication this dropped significantly. We also modified the registration process to add a captcha. I didn't think this would work as spammers can be a frustratingly crafty bunch, but apparently our forums weren't worth the effort as those two measures reduced the spam to almost none.
Page flipping was probably the biggest advantage Apple II had over CGA, and CGA wasn't the greatest possible, but the comparison isn't quite so simple as Apple II had more colors (which isn't always true).
First, do you have the CGA card connected to a composite or RGB monitor?
If a composite monitor, CGA wins big time in number of colors. You could get 16 at a time (even more with some programming trickery, though I've never seen anyone really take advantage of this). Also, there were quite a few different palettes available, you didn't have to always have the same set of 16 colors. Resolution is slightly lower (160x200 vs 280x190) though. A couple years later Apple introduced the double hi-res mode which would bring 16 colors to the Apple II.
If an RGB monitor, you can get 16 colors in 40 or 80 col text modes (compare to black and white on Apple, plus 80 col text was much sharper on CGA), but only get 4 colors at a time in 320x200 graphics or 2 colors in 640x200 graphics. Resolution is higher (320x200 vs 280x190) than Apple II. Also you can make each pixel whatever color you want without affecting other pixels, something not possible on the Apple IIe due to the oddities of using a composite display and the manner in which Apple II created some of the colors. While some clever programmers made this an advantage to apparently gain two more colors (yellow and pink if I recall) there were certain pixel combinations that just weren't possible without some bizarre unintended consequences. You were not limited to just cyan/magenta/white/black as you implied, this was the default, but other combinations were possible; background color could be any of the 16 colors, and 6 foreground color palettes were available.
and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Up until the late 80's the ST did have some nice advantages over PC, but I'm not sure this is a great example: the ST version of Starflight came out 4 years after the PC version and was improved quite a bit over the 1986 PC original (which did not really push the platform to its limits to begin with). By 1990 a PC version could easily have been much better than the ST release.
I have found maintaining Confluence on Linux and Windows to be about the same. Plone is a pain to use, I greatly prefer Confluence. Haven't used Plone in about 4-5 years though, so hopefully it's made some progress since then. I found customizing the layout/CSS with Confluence to be pretty easy. Also on one of our instances we use the Adaptavist Theme Builder plugin which allows some pretty extensive customization abilities.
Every patch basically required building a new instance, updating all the plugins, and then copying all of our customizations over to the new instance.
For patches? I don't see any reason that's necessary, the few I've applied involved dropping some class files in place and restarting the app (easy); I always test them on our dev instance, but unless if you're upgrading to a new version then yeah of course you'll need to do that but I've found the same with all the major software I've worked with where we had customizations (including Plone).
Slashdot Mirror
Colors have a lot to do with how people perceive things, so it doesn't sound too far fetched to say that some colors could be perceived as "cheap". I doubt there's really a chart per se, but here's one example showing some perceptions of some colors: http://daddu.net/the-power-of-colors. The overall design of something can certainly add a lot to perception as well, and even if a color is perceived as "cheap" the exact shade used, it's context, or quantity used can greatly override that. And just because purple used to be reserved for royalty doesn't mean that is still so; usage and perceptions can change over time.
No, people can purchase items once the site is back up, and I would agree that the number provided isn't accurate. But it may have still cost a lot of sales; some people will not go back to the site once it is up. They may buy from another site that is up (I've done this before when a retail site was down), go to a brick and mortar store, or just forget to go back later because what they were looking for wasn't terribly important.
argh, selected wrong moderation; posting to undo
I've heard this phrase a lot, but from one of our guys in Amsterdam. Never heard any of our India guys use it though.
Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
What happens when the iPhone 6 comes out with a screen the same size as the 5, but with a higher resolution? What if they have plans for an as yet unannounced version of the iPad that also uses that aspect ratio, but being much larger has a higher resolution? iOS is being used in a lot of devices with probably more variety to come; resolution independent positioning still makes sense even if you have to take a few extra aspect ratios into account now.
(Speaking as a man with a foreskin, who can't quite imagine what it would be like not to have one... uncomfortable?)
I am circumcised; it is EXTREMELY uncomfortable; at some times almost painful. I frequently find it very depressing and can't even come close to imagining how good it would feel to not have had this happen.
I'm going to go with NOT OK still, even if 100% collected goes straight to the artists. I'm fine with artists getting paid, but this is getting really out of hand (especially the dancing clause mentioned! Seriously?!). I'm ok with artists getting paid when they sell a CD or a download (whatever their contract works out to for that), I don't care so much that this goes on for long time after the recording is made, they should get paid for live performances, probably even for commercial use such as in a movie or tv show, but I see no reason they need to get paid for every single playing of the song - this seems completely unreasonable to me and appears as nothing more than a greedy money grab that does little other than make me annoyed. The DJ bought the song/album, that's it; he should be able to play it whenever for whomever after that, the whole "public performance" thing is pretty much bullshit to begin with. My no-name cover band should be able to perform it without paying fees, and so on...The ridiculous ways they're trying to scrounge up every last penny is really getting to be tiresome (ok, never mind getting to be....is)
software piracy is software piracy... if it were a real problem for Microsoft and the other companies, then they'd implement proper locks on the software,
Implement proper locks?! And how do you do that? Normally I keep reading comments here about how DRM is always destined to fail, which so far is true as far as I know. And they seem to be trying, such as Ubi's always available internet connection, Microsoft's online activation and 'trusted computing', and others that people have complained about. How do you implement a proper lock on software while making the experience decent enough for the user to use your software yet effective at preventing copying (heck, even screwing the user, how do you implement uncrackable copy protection? Remember, it just takes one person to get past it, the vast majority of people don't need to be that smart to pirate...) You may be right about the love/hate relationship with pirating to avoid people from using the competition, but implementing copy protection that works isn't exactly a trivial task.
Not for long... http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Xbox_360_Edition
Actually, they shouldn't be on the list. They both have limits to the number of hours they can work to prevent fatigue on the job. Here's an article that mentions some of the requirements.
In the end I've found the move to have pros and cons. The pros are that we simply never had the hardware infrastructure to provide the uptime requested of us (yet we were denied budget to build said infrastructure). In theory, our cloud providers can provide that uptime (or so our contract says). Development of our sites has been a nightmare though, the environment seems to lend itself to easily creating all sorts of spaghetti code (not sure yet if that is our relative unfamiliarity with the environment and/or lack of skill from the company we outsourced some of the work to, etc). Really I prefer keeping things in house for more control and flexibility, but I'm outnumbered with that opinion and that definitely isn't the way things are going (at least for us).
A better answer to your question is that the Mark Bretherton (CEO) expresses a reluctance to "upgrade" to digital until digital at least matches the quality of 70mm.
It says he's CEO at IMAX Theatre Sydney, the CEO of Imax Corporation is Richard Gelfond (according to Wikipedia). I'm not entirely sure what that means, is that CEO of an Australian division of Imax, or did they mean that theaters general manager or something similar? I'm glad at least at this location they're keeping 15/70 film, but as a whole Imax has really been in a rush to replace film with digital on screens that are far too big for the 2k resolution of the projectors they use.
The silver is only important for 3D; it is reflective enough to better maintain the polarization so the 3D image has less ghosting. For normal 2D images though, silver is a little too reflective; depending on how the screen is curved and where you are sitting it tends to create hotspots in the image instead of appearing more uniform. Personally I find silver screens look awful, there are good reasons theaters don't normally use them (except for 3D processes like RealD).
I have a hard time believing it's true, but it's damned impressive if it is. Best CGI ever.
There's no motion, just still photos, though. Still impressive, but I think realism with people is a lot easier to achieve when you don't have to also recreate all of the nuances of movement.
Small correction, the 2011 Solar Decathlon was held in West Potomac Park and not the National Mall (previous years were on the National Mall). This will be the last year it is held in the D.C. area apparently.
This is actually due to the fact that Sony digital projectors are so locked down with DRM that even changing the lens requires all kinds of password checks (which can potentially lock the camera down if not done correctly).
1) Camera?! er, not quite...that would be projector. 2) Why is this a DRM issue? It sounds like a (really bad) implementation issue. All the other projector models still have to deal with the same DRM (Hollywood is notoriously twitchy about this and there is no additional DRM on the Sony projectors that I've heard about...), but they don't have this issue when switching between 2D/3D films. The Sony 4K with Real D setup just isn't designed well from a usability point of view, and many modern multiplexes have shown they can screw up even the most basic of things. Also, it doesn't help that Real D needs a silver screen; that's a whole new source of image degradation that would be nice to do without (that's not unique to Sony).
Better graphics, better sound, and so simple even an idiot could make it work (standard hardware == console level simplicity == plug'n'play).
Sort of, but ever try running Amiga emulators? There's a lot of options! And many games simply won't work with defaults; in the emulated world I have found it to be every bit as complicated as DOSBox. It seems like DOSBox simplifies the DOS experience while WinUAE complicates the Amiga experience.
For the era 1985 to 95, almost every game looks and plays better Via the Amiga version.
Not quite true; Amiga was typically better in the mid 80's, but that changed long before 1995, especially once VGA became available in 1987 and not long after sound cards started beating out the Amiga's internal sound; Amiga had the advantage at first but it didn't really keep up. It really depends on the developer/game; some developers did a miserable job porting to other platforms, leaving the PC or Amiga version well below what the platform could do. It also depended what PC you had, some games could be much better than Amiga or much worse than Amiga depending on the specific configuration being used.
Remember how different the Mac and Windows versions of IE were back when both existed? Even if they did release a Mac version (which I think it's safe to say they won't bother doing) I'm not sure I would trust that each work the same and would still want to test both of them individually.
Avatar made money only because it was a first of the new technology of 3d. It has zero re-watch-ability so DVD sales will be dismal at best.
Dismal at best? Avatar-DVD-and-Blu-ray-smash-sales-records or how about 'Avatar' DVD sells big, despite paltry two dimensions or Avatar Crushes Yet Another Record: DVD and Blu-Ray Sales. Just a few random links, google revealed quite a few saying the same thing. I'm sure some people bought a copy and then regretted it, but it seems a lot people didn't seem to mind (or didn't expect to mind) the lack of 3D.
when it gets to the "good part" suddenly cut off the audio and/or video?
Ah, so most movies play all the way through with no problems then!
much better than buying a $300 to $400 graphics card that sounds like a jet engine and sucks up electricity.
I like my Xbox 360, but to be fair it also sounds like a jet engine and sucks up electricity.
Does it really prevent spam?
It may! It did for our forums at least. We used to allow anonymous access and started getting a lot of spam. After requiring authentication this dropped significantly. We also modified the registration process to add a captcha. I didn't think this would work as spammers can be a frustratingly crafty bunch, but apparently our forums weren't worth the effort as those two measures reduced the spam to almost none.
Page flipping was probably the biggest advantage Apple II had over CGA, and CGA wasn't the greatest possible, but the comparison isn't quite so simple as Apple II had more colors (which isn't always true).
First, do you have the CGA card connected to a composite or RGB monitor?
If a composite monitor, CGA wins big time in number of colors. You could get 16 at a time (even more with some programming trickery, though I've never seen anyone really take advantage of this). Also, there were quite a few different palettes available, you didn't have to always have the same set of 16 colors. Resolution is slightly lower (160x200 vs 280x190) though. A couple years later Apple introduced the double hi-res mode which would bring 16 colors to the Apple II.
If an RGB monitor, you can get 16 colors in 40 or 80 col text modes (compare to black and white on Apple, plus 80 col text was much sharper on CGA), but only get 4 colors at a time in 320x200 graphics or 2 colors in 640x200 graphics. Resolution is higher (320x200 vs 280x190) than Apple II. Also you can make each pixel whatever color you want without affecting other pixels, something not possible on the Apple IIe due to the oddities of using a composite display and the manner in which Apple II created some of the colors. While some clever programmers made this an advantage to apparently gain two more colors (yellow and pink if I recall) there were certain pixel combinations that just weren't possible without some bizarre unintended consequences. You were not limited to just cyan/magenta/white/black as you implied, this was the default, but other combinations were possible; background color could be any of the 16 colors, and 6 foreground color palettes were available.
and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Up until the late 80's the ST did have some nice advantages over PC, but I'm not sure this is a great example: the ST version of Starflight came out 4 years after the PC version and was improved quite a bit over the 1986 PC original (which did not really push the platform to its limits to begin with). By 1990 a PC version could easily have been much better than the ST release.
Every patch basically required building a new instance, updating all the plugins, and then copying all of our customizations over to the new instance.
For patches? I don't see any reason that's necessary, the few I've applied involved dropping some class files in place and restarting the app (easy); I always test them on our dev instance, but unless if you're upgrading to a new version then yeah of course you'll need to do that but I've found the same with all the major software I've worked with where we had customizations (including Plone).