Your friends may not be imperceptive slobs. They might just have differently-built eyes.
I'll bet their eyes do other positive things that yours can't do, like ignore the rapidly-strobed tail lights on the Caddy in front of them.
I submit that Darwin might allow these "imperceptive slobs" to genetically prevail, given enough time, enough people, enough Cadillacs, and enough bad mojo on the highway.
In particular, the white LED desk lamp (which is now very dim) that my wife gave me about a decade ago. It flickers quite quickly, but never did produce enough light that it was an issue. I give it a break because of early-adopter status.
Or some cars (seems to be mostly Cadillac): The tail lights are annoying, providing strobed after-images as I scan the road for random weirdness while driving because their PWM method is just too damn slow.
Or LED christmas lights. These can be really bad: Many of them don't even bother with a bridge rectifier to double the frequency, so they blink at a sinusoidal 60Hz. I find these very hard to be around.
In terms of displays, I don't have much experience. All of the large LCDs in my house, or that I regularly use, are fluorescent-backlit, and seem to have enough phosphorescent persistence that I don't notice any flicker even when they're quite well-dimmed. The LCDs in my last couple of fancy phones use LED backlighting, but I've not been bothered by them.
And for general-purpose lighting, I find the recent crop of AC-driven LEDs to be quite nice in terms of flicker (in that I don't notice any), though I don't always like the color of them.
(In case it is a useful reference point, I find some plasma TVs difficult to watch as well.)
But whatever. The fact is that LEDs can be bothersome, at least for me, in every-day life. Are the folks building modern LED-backlit displays doing a good-enough job of managing their PWM functions that flicker is universally unnoticeable? Dunno.
I imagine the labor laws are rather lax in the places where they have their offices. I don't think they're committing to hiring a person for N number of months straight off the bat. Those 3000 could be tried out and laid off continuously until they have ~300 good developers that they can spread out across ~50 projects at any one time.
Isn't it like that in any jurisdiction that allows at-will employment?
In Ohio, at least, the rule of law is basically as such:
Q: "Will I have a job tomorrow?"
A: "Maybe!"
or from the other side of the fence:
Q: "Can I get rid of this employee who is useless to me?"
However dash cam and logging devices are double edged swords. Along with proving you're not at fault, they can also prove you did something wrong and many people in my experience dont know when they're doing something wrong.
If you've done something wrong and it results in an accident and it is recorded on video and/or one's own black box solution, then that seems like the perfect time to ingest (or otherwise eliminate or destroy) the MicroSD card.
It ain't perfect, but it does dull the edge on the back-side of that sword pretty substantially, while maintaining plausible deniability: "Yeah, normally I do record everything with my dashcam. But I borrowed the card from it to install a new Linux distro on my toaster last night, and forgot to put it back today."
I don't want to see pixels, ever, when I'm just using a computer for...computing. I just want smoothly-rendered fonts.
When I had a CRT, this was easy: Set the resolution to something ridiculous, tweak the modeline to get a respectable refresh rate, increase the font sizes accordingly, and done.
When I would work with graphics back then, sure: Seeing the pixels was sometimes useful, but that's always just a couple of taps of the zoom hotkey away no matter how finely-pitched the display is.
Re: Film. You must be British if you think that film is 25fps.;) But the truth is, we've had a long, long time to optimize techniques for dealing with conventional film speeds. Meanwhile this new-fangled high-speed digital stuff is still so new that it frankly must still be poorly-understood as a production medium, as to say otherwise is to also suggest that we've learned as much about it as we need to.
Show me one financial institution in the US that allows this.
I have cashed cashier's checks of up to about $30,000 at a local financial institution. It took a few minutes of them talking amongst themselves, a few more minutes to count it out in $100 bills (three times), and it made my bi-fold wallet very difficult to stuff into the leg-pocket of my cargo pants (which is an absurd thing to be doing, but I did it anyway). None of this attention to detail seemed inappropriate, so I count the result as definitely being "on demand."
The institution is Fifth Third Bank. Not that I recommend them for anything in particular because they've shown themselves to be incompetent in other ways that are important to me, but they had assets on-hand to deliver the amount within short order and without any sort of appointment.
*shrug* If the issue is whether or not any financial institution has large quantities of cash on-hand (for various definitions of "large"), I can say: Yes. No problem. (For me. So far.)
The PS3 already accepts Bluetooth and USB audio from various sources, and I have no doubt that the PS4 will continue this trend. It is unclear to me how the Kinect's microphone on the Xbone is in any way advantageous toward "I am the alpha and the omega" broadcasts.
If opening the device is acceptable, then wiring a switch in series might be better than clipping the wires: It allows choices. (And choices are always good.)
Better than half the computers sold no longer even include a discrete GPU
Has it ever been the case in the past decade that more than half of the computers sold included a discrete GPU?
Once integrated graphics became a useable thing, the vast majority of systems that I see* do not have a dedicated graphics card: Integrated graphics of the day have always been adequate for any non-gaming usage of that same day, and people are (as a rule) cheap.
*: This is an anecdote based on a couple of decades of fixing computers. I welcome actual data.
What I remember from the Quake 1 days was this: The rendering was fisheyed. If I looked at a pillar, and then turned a few degrees to the right, the pillar got -bigger-: It consumed more pixels at the side of the screen, than it did in the middle of the screen.
This really bothered me at the time. I complained about it, and folks said "Well how ELSE would it be shown?"
And I'm all like "I don't care. That's not how I see things. And I hate it."
And then they're all "Whatever, fag."
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, looking at a pillar in real life, and I turn my head (or my gaze) to the side, and it doesn't get bigger. It just moves over a bit in my field of vision, and doesn't look at at like looking through a magnified peephole in a door.
In retrospect, it is clear that this rendering method was done so that CPUs of the day could keep up at a reasonable framerate, as the periphery would require fewer polygons and thus render faster.
It also seems clear to me that something like Rift, which is intended to encompass the entire field of view, the system would need to be particularly careful about how it handled such things.
But then, output devices don't control fisheye. Game programmers do. Perhaps it can improve simply through better software design.
About 20 years ago, people still sometimes had to use dialing codes to make a phone call to a cellphone. We had a list in the kitchen next to the telephone of some common ones. "I think Mom said she'd be in Cleveland today...let's try that one first."
This was AMPS, of course. Things have improved a bit since then.
Oh, and then D-AMPS happened. And CDMA2000 1xRTT. And EVDO. And 3G. And LTE. Coverage has gone from "it usually works if you're near a highway" to pretty much just being expected to work just about everywhere.
Overall, it has been a steady stream of improvements. This year really is no different. So LTE's being rolled out. Cool! But that's not so different than a few years ago, when 3G was being rolled out.
Curse you and your long-winded Youtube link. After the "accidental" shootings and tazings, I've been watching "complaint form" failure porn for about twenty menutes.
Thanks, I guess. Now I don't even know if I like being in a CCW state, or not.
So are all of the ecosystems that thrive on developed arable land, and forests, and swamps and marshes, and coastlines, and shorelines, and shallow water, and deep water, and brackish water, and...
So what? Either we're more important than an existing ecosystem, or we're not, or we continue to burn fossil fuels and poison all of the ecosystems at the same time.
As a retort to your second paragraph:
There are lots other things that can be done with power other than immediately transmit it somewhere else, and there are plenty of deserts that are within shouting distance of populated cities.
As a retort to your third paragraph:
You just discredited everything you said by virtue of being deliberately insulting instead of helpful. Thanks, I guess, for letting us know that you're an asshole straight-away instead of saving it for later.
Slashdot Mirror
Your friends may not be imperceptive slobs. They might just have differently-built eyes.
I'll bet their eyes do other positive things that yours can't do, like ignore the rapidly-strobed tail lights on the Caddy in front of them.
I submit that Darwin might allow these "imperceptive slobs" to genetically prevail, given enough time, enough people, enough Cadillacs, and enough bad mojo on the highway.
I have been bothered by LED lights.
In particular, the white LED desk lamp (which is now very dim) that my wife gave me about a decade ago. It flickers quite quickly, but never did produce enough light that it was an issue. I give it a break because of early-adopter status.
Or some cars (seems to be mostly Cadillac): The tail lights are annoying, providing strobed after-images as I scan the road for random weirdness while driving because their PWM method is just too damn slow.
Or LED christmas lights. These can be really bad: Many of them don't even bother with a bridge rectifier to double the frequency, so they blink at a sinusoidal 60Hz. I find these very hard to be around.
In terms of displays, I don't have much experience. All of the large LCDs in my house, or that I regularly use, are fluorescent-backlit, and seem to have enough phosphorescent persistence that I don't notice any flicker even when they're quite well-dimmed. The LCDs in my last couple of fancy phones use LED backlighting, but I've not been bothered by them.
And for general-purpose lighting, I find the recent crop of AC-driven LEDs to be quite nice in terms of flicker (in that I don't notice any), though I don't always like the color of them.
(In case it is a useful reference point, I find some plasma TVs difficult to watch as well.)
But whatever. The fact is that LEDs can be bothersome, at least for me, in every-day life. Are the folks building modern LED-backlit displays doing a good-enough job of managing their PWM functions that flicker is universally unnoticeable? Dunno.
Isn't it like that in any jurisdiction that allows at-will employment?
In Ohio, at least, the rule of law is basically as such:
Q: "Will I have a job tomorrow?"
A: "Maybe!"
or from the other side of the fence:
Q: "Can I get rid of this employee who is useless to me?"
A: "Of course."
*shrug*
If you've done something wrong and it results in an accident and it is recorded on video and/or one's own black box solution, then that seems like the perfect time to ingest (or otherwise eliminate or destroy) the MicroSD card.
It ain't perfect, but it does dull the edge on the back-side of that sword pretty substantially, while maintaining plausible deniability: "Yeah, normally I do record everything with my dashcam. But I borrowed the card from it to install a new Linux distro on my toaster last night, and forgot to put it back today."
As an alternative point of view:
I don't want to see pixels, ever, when I'm just using a computer for...computing. I just want smoothly-rendered fonts.
When I had a CRT, this was easy: Set the resolution to something ridiculous, tweak the modeline to get a respectable refresh rate, increase the font sizes accordingly, and done.
When I would work with graphics back then, sure: Seeing the pixels was sometimes useful, but that's always just a couple of taps of the zoom hotkey away no matter how finely-pitched the display is.
Re: Film. You must be British if you think that film is 25fps. ;) But the truth is, we've had a long, long time to optimize techniques for dealing with conventional film speeds. Meanwhile this new-fangled high-speed digital stuff is still so new that it frankly must still be poorly-understood as a production medium, as to say otherwise is to also suggest that we've learned as much about it as we need to.
Meh. I have a low tolerance for being insulted for noticing things that other people either ignore or also do not understand.
Thanks, though. I'll keep this in mind the next time I'm annoyed by it in an FPS.
I have cashed cashier's checks of up to about $30,000 at a local financial institution. It took a few minutes of them talking amongst themselves, a few more minutes to count it out in $100 bills (three times), and it made my bi-fold wallet very difficult to stuff into the leg-pocket of my cargo pants (which is an absurd thing to be doing, but I did it anyway). None of this attention to detail seemed inappropriate, so I count the result as definitely being "on demand."
The institution is Fifth Third Bank. Not that I recommend them for anything in particular because they've shown themselves to be incompetent in other ways that are important to me, but they had assets on-hand to deliver the amount within short order and without any sort of appointment.
*shrug* If the issue is whether or not any financial institution has large quantities of cash on-hand (for various definitions of "large"), I can say: Yes. No problem. (For me. So far.)
The PS3 already accepts Bluetooth and USB audio from various sources, and I have no doubt that the PS4 will continue this trend. It is unclear to me how the Kinect's microphone on the Xbone is in any way advantageous toward "I am the alpha and the omega" broadcasts.
Why not just run a drill through it?
If opening the device is acceptable, then wiring a switch in series might be better than clipping the wires: It allows choices. (And choices are always good.)
Nothing is totally random.
And your data was clearly vague, and therefore unreliable.
Has it ever been the case in the past decade that more than half of the computers sold included a discrete GPU?
Once integrated graphics became a useable thing, the vast majority of systems that I see* do not have a dedicated graphics card: Integrated graphics of the day have always been adequate for any non-gaming usage of that same day, and people are (as a rule) cheap.
*: This is an anecdote based on a couple of decades of fixing computers. I welcome actual data.
I don't own a Rift, and I likely won't.
But:
What I remember from the Quake 1 days was this: The rendering was fisheyed. If I looked at a pillar, and then turned a few degrees to the right, the pillar got -bigger-: It consumed more pixels at the side of the screen, than it did in the middle of the screen.
This really bothered me at the time. I complained about it, and folks said "Well how ELSE would it be shown?"
And I'm all like "I don't care. That's not how I see things. And I hate it."
And then they're all "Whatever, fag."
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, looking at a pillar in real life, and I turn my head (or my gaze) to the side, and it doesn't get bigger. It just moves over a bit in my field of vision, and doesn't look at at like looking through a magnified peephole in a door.
In retrospect, it is clear that this rendering method was done so that CPUs of the day could keep up at a reasonable framerate, as the periphery would require fewer polygons and thus render faster.
It also seems clear to me that something like Rift, which is intended to encompass the entire field of view, the system would need to be particularly careful about how it handled such things.
But then, output devices don't control fisheye. Game programmers do. Perhaps it can improve simply through better software design.
Your memory of IBM differs from my own.
Really?
About 20 years ago, people still sometimes had to use dialing codes to make a phone call to a cellphone. We had a list in the kitchen next to the telephone of some common ones. "I think Mom said she'd be in Cleveland today...let's try that one first."
This was AMPS, of course. Things have improved a bit since then.
Oh, and then D-AMPS happened. And CDMA2000 1xRTT. And EVDO. And 3G. And LTE. Coverage has gone from "it usually works if you're near a highway" to pretty much just being expected to work just about everywhere.
Overall, it has been a steady stream of improvements. This year really is no different. So LTE's being rolled out. Cool! But that's not so different than a few years ago, when 3G was being rolled out.
*shrug*
The two accounts are different.
You mentioned a bunch of generalized places where you say you've lived, and stated that the sidewalks were paid for by the government in those places.
I mentioned a specific instance of a thing characteristic of its kind (not a general rule as you seem to think).
One of these claims can be independently verified. The other cannot be.
Guess which one is more reliable?
It's not a question of bias. It is an example (there's that word again) of the notion that not all statements are created equally.
s/menutes/minutes/
etc
Dear Hairyfeet,
Curse you and your long-winded Youtube link. After the "accidental" shootings and tazings, I've been watching "complaint form" failure porn for about twenty menutes.
Thanks, I guess. Now I don't even know if I like being in a CCW state, or not.
Instead of just using distcc by itself, also run at least one instance of ccache?
*ducks* *runs*
As a retort to your first paragraph:
Yes, desert ecosystems are worth something.
So are all of the ecosystems that thrive on developed arable land, and forests, and swamps and marshes, and coastlines, and shorelines, and shallow water, and deep water, and brackish water, and...
Every sperm is sacred.
So what? Either we're more important than an existing ecosystem, or we're not, or we continue to burn fossil fuels and poison all of the ecosystems at the same time.
As a retort to your second paragraph:
There are lots other things that can be done with power other than immediately transmit it somewhere else, and there are plenty of deserts that are within shouting distance of populated cities.
As a retort to your third paragraph:
You just discredited everything you said by virtue of being deliberately insulting instead of helpful. Thanks, I guess, for letting us know that you're an asshole straight-away instead of saving it for later.
It was an illustration of the fact that neither of us are perfect.
Now, really: Who gives a shit? We've both corrected ourselves.
If you've some manner of useful point to make, I'm all ears.
Example: A thing characteristic of its kind or illustrating a general rule.
Anecdote: An account regarded as unreliable or hearsay.
*shrug*
Indeed. These words have different meanings. Perhaps that is why they are spelled, pronounced, and defined differently.
I see that I made a typo there: s/PS3/PS4/
I trust you'll forgive me as your prose is not exactly the crown jewel of grammatical perfection, either:
That's not a problem, it just shows that you write phonetically with little regard for what the written words actually mean.
That wasn't an anecdote. It was a specific example.