The obsession with pixel resolution is utterly ridiculous when the temporal resolution (the framerate) of most content is still so low.

24fps for movies is an accident of history, due to the practicalities of dealing with physical film. But everyone got used to it, and got used to cinematography at that framerate - so now we find it hard to change. And console gaming has mostly been stuck at a not-much-better 30fps for two whole generations, and probably the next too, due at least partly due to the push for ever-higher resolutions.

The difference between 24-30fps and double that is *vast*. That would be a much more worthwhile goal than pushing for 8K at the same old framerates.

Loot boxes with random rewards?.... Blame the games industry for getting people hooked on that shit...

If you've got a decent 5.1 system with a center speaker, and can adjust speaker volume per-speaker, the dialog issue is easily solved, just increase the center channel volume or turn the others down a bit. But there's a lot of bad soundbars around that don't give any control over how the audio is downmixed, and try to make up for it with some sort of usually-quite-poor dynamic range compression that results in the volume level of everything being all over the place. This is primarily a problem with hardware/firmware, not the content itself

The Game Boy is from a time when hardware was pure hardware, and didn't contain copyrighted software (firmware/BIOS etc). Patents on the hardware should have expired by now (maybe not in the case of the GBA, though?)

MiSTer is very cool, but not a sleek handheld device

...DPaint XXVI: Creative Cloud Edition?

Yeah, we get it, theses services suck and/or people suck, vandalising scooters and dumping them everywhere. But what about people who buy a personal scooter, make good use of it, and look after it?

In zero-g it doesn't weight very much at all. It's mass, on the other hand...

It was always impressive to see people push the limits of a C64, Amiga, or 386-486 PC. And an individual or very small team could make something (a game or demo) that pushed those limits as a hobby project.

These days... hardware is so good that there's almost no limit to what's possible - other than time/money/talent. It takes teams of 200+ a couple of years to make a AAA game, which are probably the closest it gets to pushing the limits of modern hardware. Demo contests became much more about the art and graphic design than the coding. And the music side became less interesting without the limitations of earlier platforms.

For a while, limited-size demos created a more constrained challenge. 64KB demos in particular were exciting for a while. But one group, Farbrausch, kind of got too good at that, building and iterating tools+tech for procedurally generating 3D content, releasing some amazing 64KB demos, and nobody can really compete...

Remember that the plane weighs significantly more than the passengers and luggage combined. So if you consider each passenger paying for moving their share of the plane's weight, the difference in passenger weight is rather less significant

And MacOS seems likely to be absorbed into iOS long before desktop Windows vanishes

Throughout the 80s and 90s, videogames created a generation of programmers. We started by playing games. Then thought 'how do these games work? could I make my own?'. Then started tinkering with BASIC, enjoyed it, and wanted to learn more, and create software of our own. It's sad how much things have changed. Instead of booting into BASIC and encouraging you to tinker, devices pretty much boot into a storefront and the apps constantly beg you to spend. :(

It takes a fairly big, powerful drone to carry a couple of large pizzas. Spinning propellors on big powerful drones can cause nasty injuries. Safe places to land are limited (how does it actually 'make the delivery' - it can't ring a doorbell!). Navigating an urban area in 3D is hard (avoiding vehicles, overhead cables, etc). The full-scale aviation industry dislikes drones (for somewhat reasonable reasons). The general public irrationally fears drones (privacy reasons). The government fears drones (terrorism risk). Paranoid gun nuts will shoot at them. Others will steal them. Right now, drone deliveries are nothing more than a marketing gimmick, or at best, a very-long-term research project.

DJI Demands Withdrawal Of Misleading Drone Collision Video: https://www.dji.com/newsroom/n...

'Thousands of medical emergencies' related to small drones sounds a bit of an exaggeration...

Sure, the blades can cause some nasty cuts, a fair number of careless/unfortunate hobbyists have hurt themselves, and very occasionally a bystander gets hurt. But they're no more of a menace to society than, say, things like skateboards or even golf balls - which are involved in the occasional fatal accident.

But scaling these drones up to human-carrying size does sound like a recipe for disaster...