Unless they come up with california cert battery operated tanks, the bg's (bad guys) could just shoot at (under) all the engine smoke. Big, fat, mean diesels, IIRC.
Only in very old models. The now-ubiquitous M1A1/A2 Abrams runs on a 1500hp gas turbine engine. Sure it puts out some hot exhaust, but not the bellowing black smoke from a diesel engine that you envision.
there's no good way to make a low-budget video game
Beg to differ. Sure, it's very incomplete -- there's only a few levels -- and gameplay isn't the most original, and it's sure not gonna put the screws to any big-league dev/pub houses, but considering that this was made by one guy*, I find your statement entirely wrong.
(*Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm that guy. Shameless plug, but I think I've made my point pretty clear.)
The entire site gets rendered too wide on my IE6 at 1024*768 res. There's a horizontal scrollbar that I have to use if I want to read everything.
Found the problem and fixed it (table with conflicting settings), the page should now fill the entire browser window without the horizontal scrollbar at 1024x768. Thank you again for bringing this to my attention.
game websites wanting to look 'cool' instead of focusing on being legible
Believe it or not, you can have both. It's a matter of visual contrast. "Bright" and "dark" when inverting the colors do not have to mean "white text on black background", preferably something less than white for the text makes for better reading in such situations. Stark white on black can actually be pretty painful to read after a while, which is why it's better to either use a slightly lighter-than-black background in such situations, or go with a font color that's less than white. Color is also a factor; high-saturation colors are especially to be avoided in a text area, regardless of brightness inversion. Ambient light is also a factor and one which is impossible to plan for; a typical office with flourescent lighting is much bright, for example, than a typical home with just a lamp or two.
There are many badly designed sites out there.
'Badly designed' is entirely subjective and a matter of personal taste, but I do get your point, and I agree with it... we just have different ideas of what 'badly designed' mean.
Linking to them as some sort of 'proof' doesn't really accomplish anything.
I was simply making the point that I'm hardly the first to use bright-on-dark text areas, nor is it a format restricted to non-commercial hobbyist sites like mine.
Next thing you'll say is probably that Flash is the pinnacle of website design because it's used so often...
Great Jumpin' Jebus, if the entire Web went all-Flash, I'd cancel my DSL! Flash can be very useful when used properly and judiciously, or used to create browser-based games (at which it excells). Pinnacle? Hardly. Hey, we agree on something!:) Um, I think. Anyway...
May I quote what you originally said...
Perhaps I spoke too soon.:/ What I should've said was, if any substantial portion of my readership have to adjust their browser settings to read my page, THEN I haven't done my job properly. To be honest, I've had quite a few compliments on my site's design (yes, from folks who actually read the text), and only one person so far has taken issue with my chosen color scheme -- that'd be you. While I'm sure there are others who share your opinion, I have to go with the majority. And right now I have other projects that demand more attention, so an entire site redesign to satisfy a minority opinion is, well, not high on my priority list at the moment. Sorry, just how it is; please don't take it personally, I don't mean it as an insult.
Find me a good daily newspaper that's printed white on black...
Simple: They use black ink on white paper, to cover the whole paper in black ink would be absurdly expensive. It's an old tradition from the days when ink was expensive.
...or even has a website that's like that.
Because the vast majority of people "expect" a newspaper to be black on white, so the news sites (mostly) stick to that format. Simple matter of customer expectations, really.:)
PS: Please feel free to continue this discussion via email (it's on my site) after this forum is archived. Even though we disagree on many points, I do appreciate the feedback and constructive criticism. Thanks again.
Your website requires me to disable images or override your CSS to be remotely legible. Don't use dark backgrounds.
Youmeanlikethis? Really, the 'bright text on dark background' format is becoming nearly as common as the more traditional 'dark on bright'. Though I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference.
Hmph. You're right. Apparently, just resizing IE's window to 1024x768 with QuikSize isn't enough to catch such errors. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. If you wish to discuss this issue or anything else with me further, please email me via my site, so we're not wasting this forum on offtopic discussions.
The site you mention seems slightly broken in IE, and that is a problem.
I've tested the pages in IE6 and Firefox on three different machines, and I thought I'd caught all the bugs. At the moment, I can't see any problems in IE when I open the page, but if you could be more specific about what appears to be broken I will gladly work on fixing it over the next few days.
That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font si[z]e with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage.
I would argue that you're wrong, or that at the very least this reasoning does not apply universally. This site (shameless plug) looks just fine regardless of the font size, or whether you use a serif or sans-serif font. The whole thing scales quite well, and does use transparent GIF spacers for "ultimate control". So where's the problem?
In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.
If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly.
In Canada speaking out what you think [however horrible] to friends is different from publishing your ideas in various forms. [emphasis mine]
But that's the whole point. While I admit ignorance of Canadian law, here in the U.S., the whole point of freedom of speach isn't so you can be a douchebag in public, but to prevent the suppression of alternative or countering political viewpoints, so that the parties in power cannot render illegal any speach which disagrees with the 'official' stance of those in power.
Unfortunately, sometimes people abuse their right of free speach, for ex. when condoning hatred of other groups, but that is by far the lesser evil compared to criminalizing speach against one's government. It's an all-or-nothing situation, folks. You may rejoice the silencing of one whose views you vehemantly disagree with, but where does it end? How long before YOUR views are illegal?
Humans are by definition imperfect, and so any laws we make will be imperfect as well. Just as Ben Franklin wrote "that it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer [in prison]", so too the same principal to speach and communication applies: Better a hundred corrupt voices be heard than a single noble voice be silenced.
I don't know if you remember RAM prices before that, but it was huge. I remember paying $400 for 16 megs.
Hell, I remember when RAM was $100 per megabyte, and a flight-sim game (can't recall name at the moment) required 16MB RAM to display the [software-rendered] water texture, and that RAM would've cost about $1600. This was before 3dfx was ever heard of, and the term "hardware 3D accelerator" made no sense. But maybe I'm just showing my age there.
Part of that was my fault though, as I assumed XT was a higher version then just plain 5600. Although I am still mad at nvidia for their fucked up naming conventions.
This one is simple: Make sure you get the 'Ultra' version of any nVidia card. Yeah, it's pricier, but by damn it's worth it. I used to have the FX 5200 Ultra, and it kept up with the framerates that my current (non-Ultra) 6600 gets now (minus the additional shader functions and DirectX 9.0c compliance, of course). GeForce Ultras will hit the wallet harder, but they'll carry you much farther in the upgrade cycle.
When you put it like that, yeah, I see your point. If I were slowly dying of a lethal, debilitating disease I might be willing to take the risk too. That's a question each infected person would have to answer for themselves, though if such a drug were available would it be right to take away their choice to use it because of the risks? Something tells me our current administration would disallow such a drug's use, but they probably won't be in power by the time this drug is available, assuming it actually works.
As I stated in a previous post, my original comments about the FDA's fast-track procedures were based on ignorance; for this I apologize.
The term "fast track" suggests that thoroughness is compromised for sake of expediency. That's not the case. It's more like putting certain drugs at the top of the review list, prioritizing based on the lethalness of the disease in question.
In that case, I stand corrected. I admit to having little knowledge of the FDA's prodecures, and my original comment was based on exactly the misconception you illustrated in your first sentence. Thanks for the insight.
How the hell is parent a troll? Granted, I'm the person he disagreed with, but "troll"? That's pretty damned unfair. I thought his argument was at least "interesting", and I'm sure some others do as well. Mods are on crack today, and I'll gladly go down in flames with him.
It was an atrocity, and one that plagues race relations to this very day, though some people seem to think the whole matter ought to be ignored in favor of a happy "we're all equals now" mantra.
Yes, it certainly was an atrocity, nobody with a shred of humanity here is arguing otherwise. However, I get the impression that you'd rather continue to fan the flames of hatred and conflict, rather than try to find common ground and bury the proverbial hatchet. Personally I prefer the latter.
He shouldn't have to. In fact, I'll so far as to say your profile is irrelevant. Everyone's is. Each comment must be judged on its own merits, and its context within the current discussion, regardless of who posted it or their profile or their previous posts in other threads or their journal entries or anything else equally non sequiter.
Read what I post, son.
That's exactly what he did, you're only pissed because he didn't like what you posted. And I too happen to agree with the mods on this one.
Back on topic...
I don't believe that "a fast track through the FDA" is ever advisable for any new drug meant for human consumption. Just because it has the potential to cure one of the world's modern plagues doesn't make the likelihood of harmful side effects any less probable. In fact, the huge demand for such a drug, and the massive use of it that will surely follow once (if) it passes through the FDA, should make the testing for potential side effects all the more important. I'm guessing more people would be using this drug than anything else the FDA has had to review and approve in quite a long time, if not ever, and I'm sure no one here wants millions of people across the world to suddely drop dead due to unforeseen effects down the road.
JPEG images are "lossy" meaning that some data (image quality) is sacrificed for the sake of higher compression (smaller file size and thus higher download speeds). PNG's are "lossless", so while the integrity of the image is preserved perfectly, this results in a larger file size. It's a trade-off. For the sake of not alienating dial-up users, I personally prefer JPEG for displaying my artwork online, even though image quality takes a (moderate) hit in the end result compared to the original image.
One other advantage of JPEG over PNG is the near-uniform rendering of JPEG files across all known graphics-capable browsers, unlike the PNG format which renders quite differently from one browser to another, especially with regards to transparency alpha channels. For ex., Firefox renders transparency (alpha) data in a PNG correctly, while Internet Explorer completely ignores the alpha channel, and thus erroneously renders the image with no transparency at all. While the 8-bit (256-grayscale) transparency and transluscency of PNG files are far superior to the all-or-nothing per-pixel transparency of GIF images, the latter has far less universal support than the former, which unfortunately negates many of the PNG format's inherant advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless they come up with california cert battery operated tanks, the bg's (bad guys) could just shoot at (under) all the engine smoke. Big, fat, mean diesels, IIRC.
Only in very old models. The now-ubiquitous M1A1/A2 Abrams runs on a 1500hp gas turbine engine. Sure it puts out some hot exhaust, but not the bellowing black smoke from a diesel engine that you envision.
there's no good way to make a low-budget video game
Beg to differ. Sure, it's very incomplete -- there's only a few levels -- and gameplay isn't the most original, and it's sure not gonna put the screws to any big-league dev/pub houses, but considering that this was made by one guy*, I find your statement entirely wrong.
(*Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm that guy. Shameless plug, but I think I've made my point pretty clear.)
The article's webpage breaks if you change the text size in your browser.
Ok, so maybe not so much "ironic", but considering the topic, that is pretty damned funny... or sad, depending on your perspective.
Zip code please? I've been thinking of moving...
The entire site gets rendered too wide on my IE6 at 1024*768 res. There's a horizontal scrollbar that I have to use if I want to read everything.
Found the problem and fixed it (table with conflicting settings), the page should now fill the entire browser window without the horizontal scrollbar at 1024x768. Thank you again for bringing this to my attention.
game websites wanting to look 'cool' instead of focusing on being legible
:) Um, I think. Anyway...
:/ What I should've said was, if any substantial portion of my readership have to adjust their browser settings to read my page, THEN I haven't done my job properly. To be honest, I've had quite a few compliments on my site's design (yes, from folks who actually read the text), and only one person so far has taken issue with my chosen color scheme -- that'd be you. While I'm sure there are others who share your opinion, I have to go with the majority. And right now I have other projects that demand more attention, so an entire site redesign to satisfy a minority opinion is, well, not high on my priority list at the moment. Sorry, just how it is; please don't take it personally, I don't mean it as an insult.
...or even has a website that's like that.
:)
Believe it or not, you can have both. It's a matter of visual contrast. "Bright" and "dark" when inverting the colors do not have to mean "white text on black background", preferably something less than white for the text makes for better reading in such situations. Stark white on black can actually be pretty painful to read after a while, which is why it's better to either use a slightly lighter-than-black background in such situations, or go with a font color that's less than white. Color is also a factor; high-saturation colors are especially to be avoided in a text area, regardless of brightness inversion. Ambient light is also a factor and one which is impossible to plan for; a typical office with flourescent lighting is much bright, for example, than a typical home with just a lamp or two.
There are many badly designed sites out there.
'Badly designed' is entirely subjective and a matter of personal taste, but I do get your point, and I agree with it... we just have different ideas of what 'badly designed' mean.
Linking to them as some sort of 'proof' doesn't really accomplish anything.
I was simply making the point that I'm hardly the first to use bright-on-dark text areas, nor is it a format restricted to non-commercial hobbyist sites like mine.
Next thing you'll say is probably that Flash is the pinnacle of website design because it's used so often...
Great Jumpin' Jebus, if the entire Web went all-Flash, I'd cancel my DSL! Flash can be very useful when used properly and judiciously, or used to create browser-based games (at which it excells). Pinnacle? Hardly. Hey, we agree on something!
May I quote what you originally said...
Perhaps I spoke too soon.
Find me a good daily newspaper that's printed white on black...
Simple: They use black ink on white paper, to cover the whole paper in black ink would be absurdly expensive. It's an old tradition from the days when ink was expensive.
Because the vast majority of people "expect" a newspaper to be black on white, so the news sites (mostly) stick to that format. Simple matter of customer expectations, really.
PS: Please feel free to continue this discussion via email (it's on my site) after this forum is archived. Even though we disagree on many points, I do appreciate the feedback and constructive criticism. Thanks again.
Your website requires me to disable images or override your CSS to be remotely legible. Don't use dark backgrounds.
You mean like this? Really, the 'bright text on dark background' format is becoming nearly as common as the more traditional 'dark on bright'. Though I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference.
Hmph. You're right. Apparently, just resizing IE's window to 1024x768 with QuikSize isn't enough to catch such errors. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. If you wish to discuss this issue or anything else with me further, please email me via my site, so we're not wasting this forum on offtopic discussions.
The site you mention seems slightly broken in IE, and that is a problem.
I've tested the pages in IE6 and Firefox on three different machines, and I thought I'd caught all the bugs. At the moment, I can't see any problems in IE when I open the page, but if you could be more specific about what appears to be broken I will gladly work on fixing it over the next few days.
Thanks for the feedback.
That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font si[z]e with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage.
I would argue that you're wrong, or that at the very least this reasoning does not apply universally. This site (shameless plug) looks just fine regardless of the font size, or whether you use a serif or sans-serif font. The whole thing scales quite well, and does use transparent GIF spacers for "ultimate control". So where's the problem?
In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.
If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly.
iT'S FABULOUS!!! OMG!!!
Fixed your typographical error. You're welcome.
Slashdot goes by GMT, so yeah, your time will be different if you're not in that zone. Who knew! :)
Wait, I thought all dark matter was non-baryonic and therefore doesn't interact with visible light, so how can you use dark fiber to transmit...
Er, wait... that's not what you mean by "dark fiber", is it?
In Canada speaking out what you think [however horrible] to friends is different from publishing your ideas in various forms. [emphasis mine]
But that's the whole point. While I admit ignorance of Canadian law, here in the U.S., the whole point of freedom of speach isn't so you can be a douchebag in public, but to prevent the suppression of alternative or countering political viewpoints, so that the parties in power cannot render illegal any speach which disagrees with the 'official' stance of those in power.
Unfortunately, sometimes people abuse their right of free speach, for ex. when condoning hatred of other groups, but that is by far the lesser evil compared to criminalizing speach against one's government. It's an all-or-nothing situation, folks. You may rejoice the silencing of one whose views you vehemantly disagree with, but where does it end? How long before YOUR views are illegal?
Humans are by definition imperfect, and so any laws we make will be imperfect as well. Just as Ben Franklin wrote "that it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer [in prison]", so too the same principal to speach and communication applies: Better a hundred corrupt voices be heard than a single noble voice be silenced.
I can't think of a single utility, public or otherwise, that doesn't have tiered acess and/or variable rates in one form or another.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but... Electricity?
Then again, maybe this depends on locality.
...I can trade the annoying neighbor lady for one of those hot female rangers from Guild Wars? After all, they are intellectual property.
:)
You may mock me, but c'mon, admit it -- a finer use of polygons simply does not exist. Especially when they're dancing.
I don't know if you remember RAM prices before that, but it was huge. I remember paying $400 for 16 megs.
Hell, I remember when RAM was $100 per megabyte, and a flight-sim game (can't recall name at the moment) required 16MB RAM to display the [software-rendered] water texture, and that RAM would've cost about $1600. This was before 3dfx was ever heard of, and the term "hardware 3D accelerator" made no sense. But maybe I'm just showing my age there.
Part of that was my fault though, as I assumed XT was a higher version then just plain 5600. Although I am still mad at nvidia for their fucked up naming conventions.
This one is simple: Make sure you get the 'Ultra' version of any nVidia card. Yeah, it's pricier, but by damn it's worth it. I used to have the FX 5200 Ultra, and it kept up with the framerates that my current (non-Ultra) 6600 gets now (minus the additional shader functions and DirectX 9.0c compliance, of course). GeForce Ultras will hit the wallet harder, but they'll carry you much farther in the upgrade cycle.
Funniest. Post. EV-AR.
When you put it like that, yeah, I see your point. If I were slowly dying of a lethal, debilitating disease I might be willing to take the risk too. That's a question each infected person would have to answer for themselves, though if such a drug were available would it be right to take away their choice to use it because of the risks? Something tells me our current administration would disallow such a drug's use, but they probably won't be in power by the time this drug is available, assuming it actually works.
As I stated in a previous post, my original comments about the FDA's fast-track procedures were based on ignorance; for this I apologize.
The term "fast track" suggests that thoroughness is compromised for sake of expediency. That's not the case. It's more like putting certain drugs at the top of the review list, prioritizing based on the lethalness of the disease in question.
In that case, I stand corrected. I admit to having little knowledge of the FDA's prodecures, and my original comment was based on exactly the misconception you illustrated in your first sentence. Thanks for the insight.
How the hell is parent a troll? Granted, I'm the person he disagreed with, but "troll"? That's pretty damned unfair. I thought his argument was at least "interesting", and I'm sure some others do as well. Mods are on crack today, and I'll gladly go down in flames with him.
Hit me.
It was an atrocity, and one that plagues race relations to this very day, though some people seem to think the whole matter ought to be ignored in favor of a happy "we're all equals now" mantra.
Yes, it certainly was an atrocity, nobody with a shred of humanity here is arguing otherwise. However, I get the impression that you'd rather continue to fan the flames of hatred and conflict, rather than try to find common ground and bury the proverbial hatchet. Personally I prefer the latter.
Check my profile before making any assumption.
He shouldn't have to. In fact, I'll so far as to say your profile is irrelevant. Everyone's is. Each comment must be judged on its own merits, and its context within the current discussion, regardless of who posted it or their profile or their previous posts in other threads or their journal entries or anything else equally non sequiter.
Read what I post, son.
That's exactly what he did, you're only pissed because he didn't like what you posted. And I too happen to agree with the mods on this one.
Back on topic...
I don't believe that "a fast track through the FDA" is ever advisable for any new drug meant for human consumption. Just because it has the potential to cure one of the world's modern plagues doesn't make the likelihood of harmful side effects any less probable. In fact, the huge demand for such a drug, and the massive use of it that will surely follow once (if) it passes through the FDA, should make the testing for potential side effects all the more important. I'm guessing more people would be using this drug than anything else the FDA has had to review and approve in quite a long time, if not ever, and I'm sure no one here wants millions of people across the world to suddely drop dead due to unforeseen effects down the road.
what are the differences between png and jpg?
JPEG images are "lossy" meaning that some data (image quality) is sacrificed for the sake of higher compression (smaller file size and thus higher download speeds). PNG's are "lossless", so while the integrity of the image is preserved perfectly, this results in a larger file size. It's a trade-off. For the sake of not alienating dial-up users, I personally prefer JPEG for displaying my artwork online, even though image quality takes a (moderate) hit in the end result compared to the original image.
One other advantage of JPEG over PNG is the near-uniform rendering of JPEG files across all known graphics-capable browsers, unlike the PNG format which renders quite differently from one browser to another, especially with regards to transparency alpha channels. For ex., Firefox renders transparency (alpha) data in a PNG correctly, while Internet Explorer completely ignores the alpha channel, and thus erroneously renders the image with no transparency at all. While the 8-bit (256-grayscale) transparency and transluscency of PNG files are far superior to the all-or-nothing per-pixel transparency of GIF images, the latter has far less universal support than the former, which unfortunately negates many of the PNG format's inherant advantages.
Ack! Why does it burn when I see?!