"What designer originally came up with the idea that light grey, 8 point text in a thin font on bright white background was the height of sophistication? And how did this idea spread???"
I think apple is to blame by way of the iphone and ipad. Those devices have a weird gamma curve and if you visually optimize black on them they turn out to be grey on other devices. And since web design focusses on mobile devices these days and the hippest of the hip 'designers' all have apple mobile devices you get terrible readibility and usability on everything not mobile and not apple.
I even have a custom CSS on slashdot so not to make the font dissolve into the background at the edge of my field of view.. Whatever the 'designers' think they're doing, it's wrong.
That sounds much more like an underdevelopd technology than any real engineering challenge. I mean, do you seriously want us to believe that putting a box around something is terribly difficult? How thick does such a gasket really need to be? 0.5mm? Wow, that would really bulk up that connector. Not.
"which for a decent machine in an area with higher power prices you could expect to pay close to the $100/yr this would cost." You don't need a 'decent' machine to act as a media server. A good enough machine will do and such a machine will never ever use up $100 worth of power in a year.
Your machine would have to suck about 50W continuously for 24 hours every single day to get up to $100 where i live and i have to pay about $0.25 per kWh. Which is pretty expensive. So your story doesn't add up.
"Virtually all Christians are taught that if they committed acts of terror like what is frequently done by Muslims"
Yeah, that's your problem right there. You basically state here that all muslims frequenctly do acts of terror. You bunch all muslims together and label them terrorists. You're a blind idiot. You fail to see that the people doing the terrorism are a select bunch. Do you even know how many muslims there are in the world? And how many of them are associated with terrorism? Right. You're full of bullshit. And never mind that gw bush pulled the nation together under the christian god before he countered an attack that killed about 3000 us citizens by killing many more us citizens. Cause, you know, that's how the US rolls bitchez. Fucking biggot.
The problem is that Forbes doesn't know who the advertisers are.
Yes, but technically it's their problem. They should take responsibility and push for advertisers to behave morally. The whole system is rotten to the core. People can't trust sites because sites can't trust their ad distributors because the ad distributors can't trust the advertisers. And noone in the chain after the user takes any responsibility for making a safe advertising system. And then they whine when people use ad blockers as their last line of defence. I mean, it's beyond ridiculous.
In my opinion you'd be wrong. It's not the advertisers that are guilty, its the website you visited. It's their fault for choosing a malicious advertiser. If they want they can then sue their advertisers.
Interesting test! What display did you use? Also, a display may mess with the picture with sharpening algo's and whatnot. 4k can be made to look sharper from a distance even when you don't actually see the actual pixels (by adding a relatively lower res sharpening filter). Did your test exclude such thigs explicitly?
Movement is definitely a factor in seeing sharp, as is contrast.
You mean Botzmanns Brain, of course. But i think that Boltzmann deviced it to show how proposterous the outcome is. Noone actually thinks it is the truth. If i did then that would mean you (and everyone else) are basically a figment of my own imagination. Also, i think it is not directly linked to what we now call the holographic principle. That one was thought up by Gerard 't Hooft some decades ago.
"Don't think it matters? What kind of result do you think Mr. Churchill might have received if he had stated, "Them Nazis is bad, we gots to beat em.""
I think people would stand up and shout:"About bloody time, you fat bastard! And twist your bloody hand when you make the V sign!"
It's painfull to see this comment modded +5, insightfull no less... Mr. Browne has nothing against second hand sales. He just has an axe to grind with gamestop, who actively prohibit customers from obtaining new games. See here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-04-12-the-real-cost-of-used-games
The thing is, nobody seems to have digged deeper than TFA and that is a real shame. It is why journalism sucks these days. Seriously. And that is why we have internet rumors going global news. There is nothing as stupid as taking news by face value these days.. People becoming parrots with no capacity to actually understand.
You need to read the RTFA article. In the article referenced by this story is a link to the actual story as told by Richard Browne...
Let me quote a key section from Richard Brownes that will shine light on this issue (and crap all over TFA).
"I've been in this industry for 25 years, I've run development (internal and external) for seven different publishers. Used games were never, have never, been an issue to any of them. Today that actually still holds true; publishers don't hate used games, but they do hate the practices of GameStop and those that followed to force used games upon their customers - if you want to hear about nuclear options, GameStop fired theirs first. A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. That's the state of retail today, and it's not healthy for the consumer at all. "
Now THAT is a different story. Supposedly GameStop doesn't allow you to buy new games when they have second hand copies around. Makes me wonder.
"Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen."
Yeah, well, i'm sort of not completely agreeing. It is still the case that a lot of hi-end productions do the production in much higher resolution than needed and scale that down at the end of the process. If you look at the PS3, with it's dual-256MB memory, you can easily see that there can't be a lot of stuff on screen texture wise. So in that case you will need to optimize the hell out of your artwork and use clever programming tricks to get the extra level of detail you see today.
Creating 3D art is peanuts today. There are great tools that let you add lots of details from a macro perspective, there are fantastic modeling, texuring, shading and animation tools that intergrate into game design workflows etc. The labour intesiveness has literarrily become a stroke of a brush. Meanwhile we see complete CG movies with way more detail in them costing less to produce than some AAA games. It just cannot be the artwork alone, not anymore.
Sure, if you want to invent your own engine then all tooling is up to you. Which means that artists will be hamered by your own lack of sophisticated tools. But that doesn't mean that there is no good workflow available for creating assets.
That's a different categorisation than mine: virus: uses an exploit in an executable to get runtime, reproduces to other files when executed. Cannot execute by itself. worm: uses an exploit in the OS to get runtime, reproduces directly from OS to OS and can use networks to infect other OSes. trojan: virus or worm arranging for a backdoor (for human or machine consumption).
But this type of classification is archaic at best. Today's malwares are much more clever and use any vector/vulnerability to get the job done. Basicly, there are several stages to a malware. You get the infection (get runtime), payload (do something, like install a server or drop more malwares) and reproduction (infect others) stages. Each can be designed with a different goal in mind and sometimes categories collapse. For instance a worms reproduction can be it's infection if everything can be done over a network and the reproduction can be seen as the payload. So you get a worm mechanism also infecting files like a virus. Or a worm used to open a hole (acting as a trojan) for more complex attacks and then goes on to infect other machines. That's what botnets do. It's becomming increasingly more difficult to classify computer malwares in these simplistic terms.
The reality is that even the initialisation code of modern GPU's is several MB in size. And the hardware is propietary. And it is so incredibly complex that you would need a serious team for a long time to make a driver for that specific piece of graphics hardware. Writing your own GPU drivers for the purpose of demos goes beyond the purpose of writing demo's. Mind you, where would you get the specifications of the diverse GPU's from? It used to be relatively easy in ye old days where almost all available hardware was either documented or simple enough to experiment your way through. Nowadays even the software interfaces to the drivers are dragons. You don't want to know what is actually happening on the bus level.
I mean, you're expecting demo guys to write their own GPU drivers while the OS community is struggeling with this despite a;arge ammount of serious people working on the issue. Go ask these guys if they would whip up a driver for the sake of a demo. Then ask them if it would fit in any size below 1MB. Note the strange looks and insecure laughs.
That is just the reality of computing these days. I first noticed when i saw java vm bytecode demo's 10 years ago. The world had changed.
Slashdot Mirror
"What designer originally came up with the idea that light grey, 8 point text in a thin font on bright white background was the height of sophistication? And how did this idea spread???"
I think apple is to blame by way of the iphone and ipad. Those devices have a weird gamma curve and if you visually optimize black on them they turn out to be grey on other devices.
And since web design focusses on mobile devices these days and the hippest of the hip 'designers' all have apple mobile devices you get terrible readibility and usability on everything not mobile and not apple.
I even have a custom CSS on slashdot so not to make the font dissolve into the background at the edge of my field of view..
Whatever the 'designers' think they're doing, it's wrong.
Flipping bits on the computer using a hammer is NOT adviced.
That sounds much more like an underdevelopd technology than any real engineering challenge.
I mean, do you seriously want us to believe that putting a box around something is terribly difficult?
How thick does such a gasket really need to be? 0.5mm? Wow, that would really bulk up that connector. Not.
If you really want to take it to the next level tho you'd encode the messages into haploid DNA...
This works by turning your body into an antenna. It's convenient all right. But secure?
"which for a decent machine in an area with higher power prices you could expect to pay close to the $100/yr this would cost."
You don't need a 'decent' machine to act as a media server.
A good enough machine will do and such a machine will never ever use up $100 worth of power in a year.
Your machine would have to suck about 50W continuously for 24 hours every single day to get up to $100 where i live and i have to pay about $0.25 per kWh. Which is pretty expensive. So your story doesn't add up.
Safety you say? So it would actually be SAFER to fly next to an exploding rocket? Interesting...
So, microsoft software after all?
"Virtually all Christians are taught that if they committed acts of terror like what is frequently done by Muslims"
Yeah, that's your problem right there.
You basically state here that all muslims frequenctly do acts of terror. You bunch all muslims together and label them terrorists. You're a blind idiot.
You fail to see that the people doing the terrorism are a select bunch. Do you even know how many muslims there are in the world? And how many of them are associated with terrorism? Right. You're full of bullshit.
And never mind that gw bush pulled the nation together under the christian god before he countered an attack that killed about 3000 us citizens by killing many more us citizens. Cause, you know, that's how the US rolls bitchez. Fucking biggot.
Our society is supposed to believe that people can improve themselves and we should (eventually) forgive people.
Then what did this person show that would make you think he improved himself?
The problem is that Forbes doesn't know who the advertisers are.
Yes, but technically it's their problem. They should take responsibility and push for advertisers to behave morally.
The whole system is rotten to the core.
People can't trust sites because sites can't trust their ad distributors because the ad distributors can't trust the advertisers. And noone in the chain after the user takes any responsibility for making a safe advertising system. And then they whine when people use ad blockers as their last line of defence.
I mean, it's beyond ridiculous.
In my opinion you'd be wrong. It's not the advertisers that are guilty, its the website you visited. It's their fault for choosing a malicious advertiser. If they want they can then sue their advertisers.
Interesting test!
What display did you use?
Also, a display may mess with the picture with sharpening algo's and whatnot. 4k can be made to look sharper from a distance even when you don't actually see the actual pixels (by adding a relatively lower res sharpening filter). Did your test exclude such thigs explicitly?
Movement is definitely a factor in seeing sharp, as is contrast.
Here is the actual transcript: ... shame on ... you? ... ... ... A fooled man can't get fooled again!"
"Fool me once, shame on
"But applause as MS is truly adopting to open source"
Well, now that systemd is in place there is no reason for them not to.
"I don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, "
Believe what you want, but please explain the data.
You mean Botzmanns Brain, of course. But i think that Boltzmann deviced it to show how proposterous the outcome is. Noone actually thinks it is the truth. If i did then that would mean you (and everyone else) are basically a figment of my own imagination.
Also, i think it is not directly linked to what we now call the holographic principle. That one was thought up by Gerard 't Hooft some decades ago.
"Don't think it matters? What kind of result do you think Mr. Churchill might have received if he had stated, "Them Nazis is bad, we gots to beat em.""
I think people would stand up and shout:"About bloody time, you fat bastard! And twist your bloody hand when you make the V sign!"
It's painfull to see this comment modded +5, insightfull no less...
Mr. Browne has nothing against second hand sales.
He just has an axe to grind with gamestop, who actively prohibit customers from obtaining new games.
See here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-04-12-the-real-cost-of-used-games
The thing is, nobody seems to have digged deeper than TFA and that is a real shame.
It is why journalism sucks these days. Seriously.
And that is why we have internet rumors going global news.
There is nothing as stupid as taking news by face value these days..
People becoming parrots with no capacity to actually understand.
YOUR FUCKING AUTOMATED MORONS, there is said it.
You need to read the RTFA article.
In the article referenced by this story is a link to the actual story as told by Richard Browne...
Let me quote a key section from Richard Brownes that will shine light on this issue (and crap all over TFA).
"I've been in this industry for 25 years, I've run development (internal and external) for seven different publishers. Used games were never, have never, been an issue to any of them. Today that actually still holds true; publishers don't hate used games, but they do hate the practices of GameStop and those that followed to force used games upon their customers - if you want to hear about nuclear options, GameStop fired theirs first. A colleague of mine brought to light how bad this has become just the other week. He went into his local GameStop and was point blank REFUSED the option of buying the game he went to get new. After pressuring the sales assistant for a few minutes he finally got his new game - but only after the assistant got his manager's approval to sell it to him. That's the state of retail today, and it's not healthy for the consumer at all. "
Now THAT is a different story.
Supposedly GameStop doesn't allow you to buy new games when they have second hand copies around.
Makes me wonder.
"Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen."
Yeah, well, i'm sort of not completely agreeing.
It is still the case that a lot of hi-end productions do the production in much higher resolution than needed and scale that down at the end of the process.
If you look at the PS3, with it's dual-256MB memory, you can easily see that there can't be a lot of stuff on screen texture wise.
So in that case you will need to optimize the hell out of your artwork and use clever programming tricks to get the extra level of detail you see today.
Creating 3D art is peanuts today.
There are great tools that let you add lots of details from a macro perspective, there are fantastic modeling, texuring, shading and animation tools that intergrate into game design workflows etc.
The labour intesiveness has literarrily become a stroke of a brush.
Meanwhile we see complete CG movies with way more detail in them costing less to produce than some AAA games.
It just cannot be the artwork alone, not anymore.
Sure, if you want to invent your own engine then all tooling is up to you. Which means that artists will be hamered by your own lack of sophisticated tools.
But that doesn't mean that there is no good workflow available for creating assets.
That's a different categorisation than mine:
virus: uses an exploit in an executable to get runtime, reproduces to other files when executed. Cannot execute by itself.
worm: uses an exploit in the OS to get runtime, reproduces directly from OS to OS and can use networks to infect other OSes.
trojan: virus or worm arranging for a backdoor (for human or machine consumption).
But this type of classification is archaic at best.
Today's malwares are much more clever and use any vector/vulnerability to get the job done.
Basicly, there are several stages to a malware.
You get the infection (get runtime), payload (do something, like install a server or drop more malwares) and reproduction (infect others) stages.
Each can be designed with a different goal in mind and sometimes categories collapse.
For instance a worms reproduction can be it's infection if everything can be done over a network and the reproduction can be seen as the payload.
So you get a worm mechanism also infecting files like a virus.
Or a worm used to open a hole (acting as a trojan) for more complex attacks and then goes on to infect other machines.
That's what botnets do.
It's becomming increasingly more difficult to classify computer malwares in these simplistic terms.
"The quest to find random numbers is the quest to entangle our locality to ever more distantly blah blah blah"
Yawn...
For me randomness is just a tool against boredom.
#8a713e9425f61c01035b63ec5358097f
'Lame.'
The reality is that even the initialisation code of modern GPU's is several MB in size.
And the hardware is propietary.
And it is so incredibly complex that you would need a serious team for a long time to make a driver for that specific piece of graphics hardware.
Writing your own GPU drivers for the purpose of demos goes beyond the purpose of writing demo's.
Mind you, where would you get the specifications of the diverse GPU's from?
It used to be relatively easy in ye old days where almost all available hardware was either documented or simple enough to experiment your way through.
Nowadays even the software interfaces to the drivers are dragons. You don't want to know what is actually happening on the bus level.
I mean, you're expecting demo guys to write their own GPU drivers while the OS community is struggeling with this despite a ;arge ammount of serious people working on the issue.
Go ask these guys if they would whip up a driver for the sake of a demo.
Then ask them if it would fit in any size below 1MB.
Note the strange looks and insecure laughs.
That is just the reality of computing these days.
I first noticed when i saw java vm bytecode demo's 10 years ago. The world had changed.
""demo scene" requires an extra byte compared to "demoscene" ;)"
That is why the people in the scene generally refer to it simply as 'the scene' or just 'scene'.