The actual reason for this happening is that Microsoft's renderer heavily clamps the font's outline to be on pixel boundaries. The point at the top of an "i" literally becomes a square, nothing to do with having fewer shades available.

They actually changed this in Vista, with DirectWrite adding support for sub-pixel rendering (basically, removing the clamping). Many people reacted badly to it because it made things look a bit less sharp in the same way you dislike FreeType, and so very few apps actually turn this feature on.

Some particularly problematic scenes involving mostly a single color should still benefit, but I tend to agree especially for movie watching. The real purpose of moving to 10-bit components is to accommodate the ~3x larger gamut without introducing banding compared to 8-bit.

Except every 4K/8K UHDTV broadcast will be using Rec. 2020, in this wide gamut, and cameras have been able to capture images outside of the sRGB gamut for some time. The content will exist.

Right. This is because the de-facto standard 8-bit output is sRGB. These monitors are doing something outside of this standard and require proper color management to make things look correct.

The difference here is that we've got a fairly clean slate with 10-/12-bit UHDTV and Rec. 2020. There's no reason for any device to assume sending sRGB in this case will give the correct results. The TVs/monitors will use it. The content will use it. HEVC has a Main 10 profile added specifically for use with UHDTV.

With 10-bit processing you should be able to do color management without any perceptible loss in quality.

4K/8K will sell UHDTV. But the best benefit, a gem rarely mentioned: it features a hugely increased gamut and 10 or 12-bit (10-bit mandatory minimum) component depth. The image will look more life-like than any of the common TVs available today, and it won't be relegated to photographers and graph designers: it'll be standard.

Don't forget Serious Sam 3, who's DRM manifested as an invulnerable pink scorpion.

This is what happens when games are made by gamers. It's mainly the big, long-disconnected companies that think DRM will save their games from pirates; everyone else just acknowledges it with a little fun.

That it'll take 2x-3x longer than it takes in my head. If there are no spec changes (i can dream, right?) or other surprises, maybe put that down to 1.5x.

When given a project, I'm sure most people will have a macro-level architecture thought up within minutes. It all seems so easy at that point! If you're lucky you get to spend a little more time in thought before being asked for a time estimate. If you're unlucky, well... in those cases I just multiply by 3. Underpromise, overdeliver and all that.

They have the tech. It wouldn't take long to add credit card processing to HBO GO. Clearly something is holding them back -- they're able to make more money from the cable companies alone than they would from allowing anyone to pay for streaming. Likely due to cable companies threatening to not pay as much if that were to happen.

You can losslessly, mathematically translate between this and RGB (certainly not sRGB) and CMYK. But that's just math. Printing is difficult due to the physical variables of the subtractive color model. The more money you throw at it -- that is to say, the better and more inks and quality of paper you use -- the better it gets. No new physical or mathematical colorspace will improve color reproduction.

Anyone remember The Great Zero Challenge?

For solid state drives a physical destruction might be required, but I'm still not convinced anyone could beat the challenge with a HDD if it were still happening today.

Then again, why not just encrypt everything. No need to do anything when you're done with the data, then.

Anyone who follows codecs will know that VP8 is extremely similar to H.264 baseline, enough that patent infringement is an almost certainty. As much as we wish that wasn't true, it is. Their "work around" was to give identical technologies different names and put their fingers into their ears screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" denying any patent infringement. When they realized this wasn't going to work, Google finally licensed the patents from MPEG LA.

The more interesting (though not entirely surprising) bit from this news is that MPEG LA might not actually own all the patents required for H.264 to work.

I agree to a point. Using good headphones and specific songs, I can tell a 192kbps VBR MP3 from FLAC.

You need to train for it, though. For me, 192kbps VBR is transparent in nearly all cases -- I really need to listen for specific things in order to hear it, and only in some songs. Before learning what to listen for, 160kbps VBR was completely transparent to me.

I keep all my music in FLAC at home, but really only because disk space is cheap and if I ever feel like moving from MP3 to Vorbis/AAC on my DAP, I can do so without re-ripping.

Hopefully the teacher knows his stuff and is a good editor.

Speaking from experience, C++ is complex enough to fool you into thinking you're good at it early on when you've really only just began to scratch at the surface to see what's underneath.

The students may be writing with the best of intentions, but there's a good chance they'll give bad information. Learning to not fool yourself about your limits is an underrated skill.

On the other hand, writing documentation for things is one of the best ways I've found to really flesh out my understanding of something, so I bet these students will come out of the project with a significantly improved understanding of the language.

I picked up Saints Row 3 on a whim when it was something like $10 for the game and all its DLC on Steam. Before that I'd known little of the series and the advertising/reviews hadn't really been compelling enough for me to try it out.

As if ripped from the brain of an acid-tripping Mark Millar, SR3's balls to the wall ridiculousness somehow works, and co-op support takes it to a whole other level. I'm hooked. Give me more.