Sonic the hedgehog 1 had a time counter, though it was used more for points than as an end itself (which was to complete the levels).
It has to be said, that STH1 had the most incredible design and subtleties for achieving fast level times, especially in the Green Hill and Starlight zones. The original version was good too, but it was the addition of 0.01 second accuracy and the spin mode that was available in the Sonic Jam collection (Saturn) that really made it the most amazing challenge one can imagine.
As with most things, I feel annoyed at the extremes of both sides.
On the publisher side, there are some websites who have an obsession to extract as much cash out of the consumer as possible. Even it means that the consumer will have to trawl through 5x as many ads, for only an extra measly 1% income for the publisher. I hate this, because diminishing returns set in very quickly after a certain point. Publishers don't realise that extra 1-5% results in massive frustration for the consumer. For me personally, I hate how long they take to load in, even more than the look of them.
On the consumer side, some people simply don't realise if everyone uses something like Adblock plus, then web sites will either die, enforce more hacky advertising, or simply charge for people to view their content (and probably go bust that way). That would be a shame - web site publishers need to make a living too of course, and some of them really deserve it.
So for us slashdotters, keep on using it (we're less likely to click any ads anyway), but let's not publicize this, (and for goodness sake, make sure FF doesn't include ad blocking by default). We all win this way, and hopefully a fairly comfortable middleground is reached.
But how about if the diamond is itself made into the blade shape? Even if it's just the 1st mm at the tip. Yeah, it would be expensive, but many rich folks could afford it.
Yes, I've heard that before, but it doesn't make much sense. And the reason is because the time that's used for that realization (which is a small fraction of a second), can be used in the new way to simply think further before pressing. In other words, it's effectively exactly the same, with no amount of time lost in the new approach.
Anyway, that would be for the uncertain cases. For the certain cases, one can happily press that button without even that 0.1s thought. And if you've seen Chrome, or something like the 3D Blender interface, you'll know that it feels much more responsive and nicer to use.
People would just need to get out the habit of the old way.
Smaller latency waits for general GUI stuff are much more important than the slightly slower benchmarks shown. Even if they're not noticed easily, they're like a dripping tap on the subconscious, so I'm glad W7 improves in this area.
:) Glad to hear you think these small latencies are important too.
Because they're typically hard to measure and sporadic (with the smaller ones not even consciously noticed by many), I tend to think it's a very under-rated and unspoken about metric (similar to the way input lag was 'unknown' and argued against on some LCD monitors for a while).
Hardly 'fake' imo. 'Invisible' latencies (say 0 - 0.5s) are anything but if you look out for them. Even if you don't, they play on the subconscious like a dripping tap.
One day, button mouse down will activate buttons and other GUI widgets. That in itself feels much nicer than waiting for the LMB to be released. Chrome uses this for its tabs, and it's so much nicer.
It's been mentioned here in the past, but what would combine the awe and excitement of a 'stunt', along with the progress of science, would be to establish a manned space station/city. It can be fairly near the Earth at first, and then progress further as appropriate.
Get us off this rock before a demented asteroid decides it wants a crash in party.
But I'm thinking we wouldn't need to develop specialized models because we would just do everything through utter brute force simulation. Providing we know how air behaves.
Quick question you're probably more qualified to answer than most: If CPU speed were no object (and I really mean infinite speed), would it be fairly trivial to simulate the trillions of air particles, and craft materials to design the optimal blade mechanism and craft design for lifting efficiency?
In other words, do we know everything about how air interacts with itself and other (solid) objects? And it's just running the simulation which is the bottleneck (too slow on current CPUs)?
And now listen to some of the latest Japanese pop - don't you find it just a tiny bit odd how much like Western pop it is? (I enjoy all types of music, and think most (but not all) modern pop is crap for the record).
Look I'm not saying I have the best taste in music in the world, and I've known people who at least partially subscribe to relativism and have *decent* taste in music. I've known the reverse too (people like myself, except with probably bad taste).
But let's not start putting all music (or even a culture's music) on an equal footing shall we. Every time you hear a piece where you can't possibly see what's good in it, start to think that it may not be the music intrinsically that people are enjoying, but rather the indirect feelings and associations they are getting, as a BYPRODUCT of that music.
For that reason and its historical role as the refutation / logical conclusion to serialism, yes it is a masterpiece of composition.
So it's great for all the wrong reasons. Intrinsically (which is what should count), the music is poor, because it would never stand the test of time. People in 500 years time won't start saying, how 'wonderful' it is. Because they can't (it's garbage). The most they can say is how much it affected society. That may be notable in its own right, but *please* don't go as far as to say the music is intrinsically of worth.
Oh and by the way, complexity may not be the ultimate goal, because many great pieces are simple, but I would say it has a higher potential of being good. The more complex a piece of music, the more difficult it is to make it good too, but the rewards are better.
Yes and 4'33" was a real masterpiece. SURE it was. Sorry, I get quite agitated when I hear that used as an excuse that all music is equally as good.
I think one of the things the intrinsic quality of a piece of art is blurred is because of the memories and associations that it inpsires. So it turns out that a piece of art may cause happiness indirectly (most of the examples you provide are perfect examples of that - it's not the music doing most of the talking).
But on the other hand, a lot of music (and some artwork such as fractals or the Taj Mahal) are more abstract and so provide less opportunity for the indirect, if very real indirect 'goodness' that work provides.
Naturally, I tend to think the best artworks/music don't have to rely on triggering peoples' past memories/experiences to be good.
The best music may have intricate melodies and counterpoint (while still maintaining a dominant melody simultaneously perhaps). The rhythm would be intricate and subtle too, but can still contain dominant bits to it. Some timbres really *are* better than other timbres on the average and likewise, certain chord sequences are better than other combinations.
Uh oh, it's one of those hard-line relativist type rants again.
One choice quote from the article:
The same reason you get the opinion "The primacy of human intelligence is one of the last and greatest myths of the anthropomorphic divide
Okay, human intelligence may be fuzzy and difficult to objectively measure. But that applies to many things such as CPU speed, Kolmogorov complexity, how complicated a shape is, or how much heat/sound insulation a particular material provides. Even how good a piece of music/art is.
They're tricky, but there's no doubt that exponentially low and high numbers can be given to each of those attributes.
Well in the past, survival was more important. Now we've got that out the way, beauty is becoming more 'important'. So yeah, the standard is changing, it's probably getting higher now.
Exactly. Everyone's quality of ideas are just as good as each other.
In fact, I'll go further and say that all ideas from a single person only differ in terms of content. Other than that, they are all intrinsically as good as each other, and also worthless at that. ~~~;)
People like you who are hot on the heels of new technology - we owe you a "thanks". Otherwise, new tech would never get off the ground (same with the Sony OLED TV - super expensive, but I'm grateful to all the people who can afford to buy (and in some sense) 'test' it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sonic the hedgehog 1 had a time counter, though it was used more for points than as an end itself (which was to complete the levels).
It has to be said, that STH1 had the most incredible design and subtleties for achieving fast level times, especially in the Green Hill and Starlight zones. The original version was good too, but it was the addition of 0.01 second accuracy and the spin mode that was available in the Sonic Jam collection (Saturn) that really made it the most amazing challenge one can imagine.
As with most things, I feel annoyed at the extremes of both sides.
On the publisher side, there are some websites who have an obsession to extract as much cash out of the consumer as possible. Even it means that the consumer will have to trawl through 5x as many ads, for only an extra measly 1% income for the publisher. I hate this, because diminishing returns set in very quickly after a certain point. Publishers don't realise that extra 1-5% results in massive frustration for the consumer. For me personally, I hate how long they take to load in, even more than the look of them.
On the consumer side, some people simply don't realise if everyone uses something like Adblock plus, then web sites will either die, enforce more hacky advertising, or simply charge for people to view their content (and probably go bust that way). That would be a shame - web site publishers need to make a living too of course, and some of them really deserve it.
So for us slashdotters, keep on using it (we're less likely to click any ads anyway), but let's not publicize this, (and for goodness sake, make sure FF doesn't include ad blocking by default). We all win this way, and hopefully a fairly comfortable middleground is reached.
Interesting.
But how about if the diamond is itself made into the blade shape? Even if it's just the 1st mm at the tip. Yeah, it would be expensive, but many rich folks could afford it.
While we're on this topic, why don't razor blade manufacturers use diamond dust/shards for the tips of the shaver blades?
I'm sure some will be thinking 'conspiracy' so joe punter has to buy more, but I'm hoping there's a more rational explanation.
Agreed.
Yes, I've heard that before, but it doesn't make much sense. And the reason is because the time that's used for that realization (which is a small fraction of a second), can be used in the new way to simply think further before pressing. In other words, it's effectively exactly the same, with no amount of time lost in the new approach.
Anyway, that would be for the uncertain cases. For the certain cases, one can happily press that button without even that 0.1s thought. And if you've seen Chrome, or something like the 3D Blender interface, you'll know that it feels much more responsive and nicer to use.
People would just need to get out the habit of the old way.
Smaller latency waits for general GUI stuff are much more important than the slightly slower benchmarks shown. Even if they're not noticed easily, they're like a dripping tap on the subconscious, so I'm glad W7 improves in this area.
:) Glad to hear you think these small latencies are important too.
Because they're typically hard to measure and sporadic (with the smaller ones not even consciously noticed by many), I tend to think it's a very under-rated and unspoken about metric (similar to the way input lag was 'unknown' and argued against on some LCD monitors for a while).
Hardly 'fake' imo. 'Invisible' latencies (say 0 - 0.5s) are anything but if you look out for them. Even if you don't, they play on the subconscious like a dripping tap.
One day, button mouse down will activate buttons and other GUI widgets. That in itself feels much nicer than waiting for the LMB to be released. Chrome uses this for its tabs, and it's so much nicer.
Honestly, if there wasn't the risk of it saving by cooincidence, I'd do a hard cold shut down EVERY time.
It's been mentioned here in the past, but what would combine the awe and excitement of a 'stunt', along with the progress of science, would be to establish a manned space station/city. It can be fairly near the Earth at first, and then progress further as appropriate.
Get us off this rock before a demented asteroid decides it wants a crash in party.
But I'm thinking we wouldn't need to develop specialized models because we would just do everything through utter brute force simulation. Providing we know how air behaves.
Quick question you're probably more qualified to answer than most: If CPU speed were no object (and I really mean infinite speed), would it be fairly trivial to simulate the trillions of air particles, and craft materials to design the optimal blade mechanism and craft design for lifting efficiency?
In other words, do we know everything about how air interacts with itself and other (solid) objects? And it's just running the simulation which is the bottleneck (too slow on current CPUs)?
Are there states in the US where the trust is higher among people in general, so they wouldn't go to jail for 'a quick look'?
And now listen to some of the latest Japanese pop - don't you find it just a tiny bit odd how much like Western pop it is? (I enjoy all types of music, and think most (but not all) modern pop is crap for the record).
Look I'm not saying I have the best taste in music in the world, and I've known people who at least partially subscribe to relativism and have *decent* taste in music. I've known the reverse too (people like myself, except with probably bad taste).
But let's not start putting all music (or even a culture's music) on an equal footing shall we. Every time you hear a piece where you can't possibly see what's good in it, start to think that it may not be the music intrinsically that people are enjoying, but rather the indirect feelings and associations they are getting, as a BYPRODUCT of that music.
For that reason and its historical role as the refutation / logical conclusion to serialism, yes it is a masterpiece of composition.
So it's great for all the wrong reasons. Intrinsically (which is what should count), the music is poor, because it would never stand the test of time. People in 500 years time won't start saying, how 'wonderful' it is. Because they can't (it's garbage). The most they can say is how much it affected society. That may be notable in its own right, but *please* don't go as far as to say the music is intrinsically of worth.
Oh and by the way, complexity may not be the ultimate goal, because many great pieces are simple, but I would say it has a higher potential of being good. The more complex a piece of music, the more difficult it is to make it good too, but the rewards are better.
I'm in the UK by the way.
Yes and 4'33" was a real masterpiece. SURE it was. Sorry, I get quite agitated when I hear that used as an excuse that all music is equally as good.
I think one of the things the intrinsic quality of a piece of art is blurred is because of the memories and associations that it inpsires. So it turns out that a piece of art may cause happiness indirectly (most of the examples you provide are perfect examples of that - it's not the music doing most of the talking).
But on the other hand, a lot of music (and some artwork such as fractals or the Taj Mahal) are more abstract and so provide less opportunity for the indirect, if very real indirect 'goodness' that work provides.
Naturally, I tend to think the best artworks/music don't have to rely on triggering peoples' past memories/experiences to be good.
The best music may have intricate melodies and counterpoint (while still maintaining a dominant melody simultaneously perhaps). The rhythm would be intricate and subtle too, but can still contain dominant bits to it. Some timbres really *are* better than other timbres on the average and likewise, certain chord sequences are better than other combinations.
One choice quote from the article:
The same reason you get the opinion "The primacy of human intelligence is one of the last and greatest myths of the anthropomorphic divide
Okay, human intelligence may be fuzzy and difficult to objectively measure. But that applies to many things such as CPU speed, Kolmogorov complexity, how complicated a shape is, or how much heat/sound insulation a particular material provides. Even how good a piece of music/art is.
They're tricky, but there's no doubt that exponentially low and high numbers can be given to each of those attributes.
Probably relatively brittle though? I can't imagine it to deform first the way aluminium would.
Same as you would do when measuring happiness maybe? Asking people.
Well in the past, survival was more important. Now we've got that out the way, beauty is becoming more 'important'. So yeah, the standard is changing, it's probably getting higher now.
Do this another 10 times or so and you'll finally get one idea that works
That means it wasn't worth zilch then...
Exactly. Everyone's quality of ideas are just as good as each other.
In fact, I'll go further and say that all ideas from a single person only differ in terms of content. Other than that, they are all intrinsically as good as each other, and also worthless at that. ~~~ ;)
D solves a lot of that quite efficiently.
People like you who are hot on the heels of new technology - we owe you a "thanks". Otherwise, new tech would never get off the ground (same with the Sony OLED TV - super expensive, but I'm grateful to all the people who can afford to buy (and in some sense) 'test' it.
Okay... yeah that's open!
Good ol' Google :)