I've had nothing but issues with my Lumia 950. Windows Mobile has some really good design/usability ideas but jesus it is buggy.
I regularly need to reboot the phone to fix GPS issues. A patch came out a few months ago that made Bluetooth not randomly get completely corrupted with my car, but the implementation is still buggy. Using apps while playing music causes stuttering in the music. I've had the phone for over a year now and it still feels like a beta device.
The worst part of it is that the previous versions -- Windows Phone 7, 8, etc. -- were masterpieces. They were stable and exceptionally lag-free. The whole idea to merge the mobile and desktop OSes -- the kernel with 8 and the shell with 10 -- wasn't a bad one but the execution was just so incredibly poor.
If Microsoft is smart they'll gut the department heads working on mobile and get some new talent in. Or maybe bring some of the old talent back. Or maybe just fold the idea.
NVIDIA has been consistently faster than AMD on the high end, and is able to price their low-end products in a way that puts them equal or better to AMD's products. NVIDIA also has a big library of code for developers to integrate with. So your games will generally run faster and look better on NVIDIA.
There is only a single reason to buy AMD right now: they support the VESA-standard variable-framerate VSYNC that almost every monitor -- even cheap ones -- is supporting now.
Agreed. While I'd prefer Github, we found their pricing to be really uncompetitive. We found Atlassian's offerings to be basically just as good but much more cost effective.
Yep. Super bright light source with a color-neutral LCD on top of it, and color LCD on top of that. Simple idea but can't imagine it was too easy to do.
The Assange/Wikileaks situation has been a bit weird for the past month, and no strong proof of life has been shown. Going with an audio interview is just going to fuel all the conspiracy nuts in/r/WhereIsAssange.
Put me in that corner. I accept the election result, but I'm baffled where all the Trump supporters came from.
About half of the people I know voted for Trump. Excuses I've heard have been: "oh he's just saying that so he can get votes from the Republican base", "well, I just don't know what Hillary is going to do to my guns", "he's going to lower taxes", "he's going to keep jobs in America", "he's going to keep terrorists out of America", "Hillary is corrupt", "Hillary is a murderer", "his past doesn't matter, it's what he'll do as president that matters".
Literally all rhetoric -- the amount of detail they're able to go into on the policies of either candidate is vanishingly small. Granted, most voters are driven by rhetoric regardless of the side they typically vote on.
But it seems to be particularly strong in the Trump crowd. They're more emotionally engaged.
I saw a video blog that said the reason that 4k on a 1080p looks so well, is the 4 pixel blocks downsampled are no longer sharing chroma, but each pixel is independent, so the higher detail. (I'm recalling from memory, so forgive me if I'm wrong).
I saw the video you were referring to, and it was partly true. Yes, of course a higher chroma resolution will look better. But the answer is more complicated than that.
I say partly because over the years many video players have taken shortcuts on quality in the name of performance or ease of implementation. Video has by and large looked worse than it needed to. Things like disabling deblocking, point resampling chroma, and imprecise YCbCr -> RGB conversion were very common and contributed to a dramatic drop in quality. If you've ever seen some red on black that looked absolutely atrocious, this is why it looked like that.
Doubling resolution is an easy way to work around those issues, because you're adding more precision in. The end result is that you'll only see error introduced by the final resampling, which is almost always subjectively good enough even when it's objectively lackluster.
The graphics industry is finally out of a decade-long rut. Consoles caused PCs to become second-class, and suddenly games and engines focused less on visual fidelity and more on portability and eeking out as much performance as possible from the relatively uncapable consoles.
144hz, 4K, HDR, VR --- these things are saving the industry, and there's enough headroom to keep growing for probably another decade.
Seems like Amazon is going back to the old TV model of releasing a new episode every week. I guess binge watching doesn't matter so much when you're not watching a story.
Regardless of the girl's wishes or the scientific viability of cryo, it must be absolutely awful to have your parents arguing about what to do with your body after you die. Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
I've noticed that after getting a 4K screen, I've felt much less need to zoom in to view text.
On some level I think this is consequence of web designers targeting mobile first a lot of the time. You tend to have much larger DPI on mobile now, and so you can make lines thinner and trade some color contrast because you have much sharper detail.
b) Police need privacy too. They have to pee and stuff, just like other people.
It should be a 2 minute long off switch that beeps to warn it's about to reactivate. The action to stop recording needs to be an explicit recorded choice and made difficult to do for long periods of time so an officer can't claim to have "forgotten" to activate it. I'd rather have an accidental piss take than a convenient lack of recording when an officer is accused of excessive force.
Go seems like another attempt â" undertaken every few years by a fresh crop of bright-but-not-wise kids â" to start a new programming language.
Rob Pike, one of Go's designers, turned me off from the language a few years ago when he posted with incredulity positing why most C++ developers weren't moving over to Go. He ends his post concluding that displays a remarkable attitude of "I'm right because everyone who disagrees with me is wrong", deciding that C++ users just don't know what's good for them.
What he doesn't understand is... the existing languages work. And they work pretty well, despite what the rabid fans of the new hot languages will tell you. Their language might do some specific thing better, but it's really only a little bit better, certainly not enough to switch to it. Most coders have at least a few different go-to languages to cover a wide breadth of problems, and adding an extra language just doesn't add any value.
There are a handful of games -- mostly cockpit games that involve cars, planes, and spaceships -- that are indisputably better with VR. EVE: Valkyrie, Project CARS, and Assetto Corsa are awesome beyond compare in VR. But there aren't many of these games, and they all fit the same formula.
And there are a few other games that, while genuinely good, don't really add much with VR. These ones make you wonder why they're not a normal game because they're limiting their market. And because VR headsets aren't the most comfortable for long-term wear, you almost wish they weren't VR games if they aren't going to use it.
And then there's the rest, which feel at best like arcade games, and at worst -- and several of them are at the worst -- like tech demos. They feel like this because we haven't quite figured out how to add fluid motion to a player in first-person, so these games either have no movement at all, nauseating WASD input, or unnatural/gimmicky movement like teleporting or "rock climbing".
The courage to move on, to do something new that betters all of us.
The Swift 2.0 language is more than 12 months old. It has its last big innovation about 6 months ago. You know what that was? They deprecated prefix and postfix operations, they made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then. It's a dinosaur. It's time to move on.
Microsoft went overnight from just another big corporation to being an active participant in a community. They didn't half-ass it like their previous MS-PL things and they aren't just hosting a copy of their repo in public. They dove in head-first and use all the same 3rd party stuff everyone else does. Non-Microsoft devs are on equal footing with those from Microsoft -- if your code is good and your points valid, they are taken.
All of the new features in C# 7 were discussed by the public, with multiple revisions coming out driven by those talks. There's a huge corpus of features in flight, some with 3rd-party implementations, ready to be picked from for C# 8.
When.NET Core was announced I saw it as an opportunity to add the features I always wished it had, fix random bugs that I'd reported but had closed as "Wont Fix" because they were without enough benefit to their business customers, etc. -- my first pull request came in so fast they told me "err sorry we haven't figured out the process for adding APIs yet, hold on."
5 Mbps is what Netflix uses for its highest-quality 1080p streams. For a movie file analogy, 5 Mbps is equivalent to 2.25 GB for a 1 hour movie. The compression is there if you really look for it, but most people won't notice it.
Movies have a natural advantage of either having very little motion or having a lot of motion blur. There are exceptions (Children of Men) but for most of them this is the case, so a low bitrate can work if you have a lot of time to encode it.
Games tend to have a lot more motion and a lot less motion blur. And this service won't be able to use good encoder settings -- it'll need to use a real-time hardware codec, which significantly limits is quality. You might say I'm skeptical.
They've put a lot of work into Edge. Now that it supports extensions and has Adblock, it may even be good enough to use regularly. It sounds unlikely but it's not without possibility that it is better than Chrome in perf.
But Bing? They're nuts. The search results are measurably worse and the user experience is lacking advanced features that makes Google so powerful.
Huge missteps mostly recently. Windows Phone 7 through 8.1 were fantastic -- always smooth as butter, responsive, relatively bug-free, had a great UI, and had fantastic tools for devs. I also own several high-end Android devices and if you could live with less apps I really do think Windows Phone was superior to Android.
10 was a huge step back -- no longer smooth and incredibly buggy. I got a Lumia 950 to replace my aging 920 and only now a year later with the Anniversary release can I say it is something they should sell, but it's still only comparable to Android levels of smoothness. I really miss the lag-free 8.1 OS.
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I've had nothing but issues with my Lumia 950. Windows Mobile has some really good design/usability ideas but jesus it is buggy.
I regularly need to reboot the phone to fix GPS issues. A patch came out a few months ago that made Bluetooth not randomly get completely corrupted with my car, but the implementation is still buggy. Using apps while playing music causes stuttering in the music. I've had the phone for over a year now and it still feels like a beta device.
The worst part of it is that the previous versions -- Windows Phone 7, 8, etc. -- were masterpieces. They were stable and exceptionally lag-free. The whole idea to merge the mobile and desktop OSes -- the kernel with 8 and the shell with 10 -- wasn't a bad one but the execution was just so incredibly poor.
If Microsoft is smart they'll gut the department heads working on mobile and get some new talent in. Or maybe bring some of the old talent back. Or maybe just fold the idea.
NVIDIA has been consistently faster than AMD on the high end, and is able to price their low-end products in a way that puts them equal or better to AMD's products. NVIDIA also has a big library of code for developers to integrate with. So your games will generally run faster and look better on NVIDIA. There is only a single reason to buy AMD right now: they support the VESA-standard variable-framerate VSYNC that almost every monitor -- even cheap ones -- is supporting now.
Agreed. While I'd prefer Github, we found their pricing to be really uncompetitive. We found Atlassian's offerings to be basically just as good but much more cost effective.
Yep. Super bright light source with a color-neutral LCD on top of it, and color LCD on top of that. Simple idea but can't imagine it was too easy to do.
To achieve a one million - to - one ratio, requires 20 bits.
20 bits would be required for a gradient, but you could still accomplish a 1,000,000:1 ratio with a 1-bit monochrome image.
The Assange/Wikileaks situation has been a bit weird for the past month, and no strong proof of life has been shown. Going with an audio interview is just going to fuel all the conspiracy nuts in /r/WhereIsAssange.
Indeed. He already won a prior reader poll, and Time chose someone else. There's no reason to think they won't do the same this time as well.
Put me in that corner. I accept the election result, but I'm baffled where all the Trump supporters came from.
About half of the people I know voted for Trump. Excuses I've heard have been: "oh he's just saying that so he can get votes from the Republican base", "well, I just don't know what Hillary is going to do to my guns", "he's going to lower taxes", "he's going to keep jobs in America", "he's going to keep terrorists out of America", "Hillary is corrupt", "Hillary is a murderer", "his past doesn't matter, it's what he'll do as president that matters".
Literally all rhetoric -- the amount of detail they're able to go into on the policies of either candidate is vanishingly small. Granted, most voters are driven by rhetoric regardless of the side they typically vote on.
But it seems to be particularly strong in the Trump crowd. They're more emotionally engaged.
I saw a video blog that said the reason that 4k on a 1080p looks so well, is the 4 pixel blocks downsampled are no longer sharing chroma, but each pixel is independent, so the higher detail. (I'm recalling from memory, so forgive me if I'm wrong).
I saw the video you were referring to, and it was partly true. Yes, of course a higher chroma resolution will look better. But the answer is more complicated than that.
I say partly because over the years many video players have taken shortcuts on quality in the name of performance or ease of implementation. Video has by and large looked worse than it needed to. Things like disabling deblocking, point resampling chroma, and imprecise YCbCr -> RGB conversion were very common and contributed to a dramatic drop in quality. If you've ever seen some red on black that looked absolutely atrocious, this is why it looked like that.
Doubling resolution is an easy way to work around those issues, because you're adding more precision in. The end result is that you'll only see error introduced by the final resampling, which is almost always subjectively good enough even when it's objectively lackluster.
The graphics industry is finally out of a decade-long rut. Consoles caused PCs to become second-class, and suddenly games and engines focused less on visual fidelity and more on portability and eeking out as much performance as possible from the relatively uncapable consoles.
144hz, 4K, HDR, VR --- these things are saving the industry, and there's enough headroom to keep growing for probably another decade.
Seems like Amazon is going back to the old TV model of releasing a new episode every week. I guess binge watching doesn't matter so much when you're not watching a story.
Regardless of the girl's wishes or the scientific viability of cryo, it must be absolutely awful to have your parents arguing about what to do with your body after you die. Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
ESports is a thing, it's big, and it's growing fast.
I've noticed that after getting a 4K screen, I've felt much less need to zoom in to view text.
On some level I think this is consequence of web designers targeting mobile first a lot of the time. You tend to have much larger DPI on mobile now, and so you can make lines thinner and trade some color contrast because you have much sharper detail.
b) Police need privacy too. They have to pee and stuff, just like other people.
It should be a 2 minute long off switch that beeps to warn it's about to reactivate. The action to stop recording needs to be an explicit recorded choice and made difficult to do for long periods of time so an officer can't claim to have "forgotten" to activate it. I'd rather have an accidental piss take than a convenient lack of recording when an officer is accused of excessive force.
Go seems like another attempt â" undertaken every few years by a fresh crop of bright-but-not-wise kids â" to start a new programming language.
Rob Pike, one of Go's designers, turned me off from the language a few years ago when he posted with incredulity positing why most C++ developers weren't moving over to Go. He ends his post concluding that displays a remarkable attitude of "I'm right because everyone who disagrees with me is wrong", deciding that C++ users just don't know what's good for them.
What he doesn't understand is... the existing languages work. And they work pretty well, despite what the rabid fans of the new hot languages will tell you. Their language might do some specific thing better, but it's really only a little bit better, certainly not enough to switch to it. Most coders have at least a few different go-to languages to cover a wide breadth of problems, and adding an extra language just doesn't add any value.
There are a handful of games -- mostly cockpit games that involve cars, planes, and spaceships -- that are indisputably better with VR. EVE: Valkyrie, Project CARS, and Assetto Corsa are awesome beyond compare in VR. But there aren't many of these games, and they all fit the same formula.
And there are a few other games that, while genuinely good, don't really add much with VR. These ones make you wonder why they're not a normal game because they're limiting their market. And because VR headsets aren't the most comfortable for long-term wear, you almost wish they weren't VR games if they aren't going to use it.
And then there's the rest, which feel at best like arcade games, and at worst -- and several of them are at the worst -- like tech demos. They feel like this because we haven't quite figured out how to add fluid motion to a player in first-person, so these games either have no movement at all, nauseating WASD input, or unnatural/gimmicky movement like teleporting or "rock climbing".
The courage to move on, to do something new that betters all of us.
The Swift 2.0 language is more than 12 months old. It has its last big innovation about 6 months ago. You know what that was? They deprecated prefix and postfix operations, they made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then. It's a dinosaur. It's time to move on.
Microsoft went overnight from just another big corporation to being an active participant in a community. They didn't half-ass it like their previous MS-PL things and they aren't just hosting a copy of their repo in public. They dove in head-first and use all the same 3rd party stuff everyone else does. Non-Microsoft devs are on equal footing with those from Microsoft -- if your code is good and your points valid, they are taken.
All of the new features in C# 7 were discussed by the public, with multiple revisions coming out driven by those talks. There's a huge corpus of features in flight, some with 3rd-party implementations, ready to be picked from for C# 8.
When .NET Core was announced I saw it as an opportunity to add the features I always wished it had, fix random bugs that I'd reported but had closed as "Wont Fix" because they were without enough benefit to their business customers, etc. -- my first pull request came in so fast they told me "err sorry we haven't figured out the process for adding APIs yet, hold on."
Have you been paying attention to the goings-on of the FCC lately? To everyone's surprise, Tom Wheeler has been anything but a cable company shill.
Yes, but this time it's Apple doing it, so it's new and innovative. Like MP3 players and multi-touch were.
5 Mbps is what Netflix uses for its highest-quality 1080p streams. For a movie file analogy, 5 Mbps is equivalent to 2.25 GB for a 1 hour movie. The compression is there if you really look for it, but most people won't notice it.
Movies have a natural advantage of either having very little motion or having a lot of motion blur. There are exceptions (Children of Men) but for most of them this is the case, so a low bitrate can work if you have a lot of time to encode it.
Games tend to have a lot more motion and a lot less motion blur. And this service won't be able to use good encoder settings -- it'll need to use a real-time hardware codec, which significantly limits is quality. You might say I'm skeptical.
Then call them out on it already. Don't care if it's Oracle holding a childish grudge or not.
They've put a lot of work into Edge. Now that it supports extensions and has Adblock, it may even be good enough to use regularly. It sounds unlikely but it's not without possibility that it is better than Chrome in perf.
But Bing? They're nuts. The search results are measurably worse and the user experience is lacking advanced features that makes Google so powerful.
Huge missteps mostly recently. Windows Phone 7 through 8.1 were fantastic -- always smooth as butter, responsive, relatively bug-free, had a great UI, and had fantastic tools for devs. I also own several high-end Android devices and if you could live with less apps I really do think Windows Phone was superior to Android.
10 was a huge step back -- no longer smooth and incredibly buggy. I got a Lumia 950 to replace my aging 920 and only now a year later with the Anniversary release can I say it is something they should sell, but it's still only comparable to Android levels of smoothness. I really miss the lag-free 8.1 OS.