http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text

0133 Ever fix a hardware problem in software?
0134 ... Vice versa?

...

0141 Ever physically destroy equipment from software?

WipeoutHD renders many frames at the full 1080p60, but uses a trick for "complex" areas with too much overdraw, that, at least in my opinion, is quite clever. They start rendering at full resolution, but time how long each row is taking, and if it looks like they won't reach the 1/60s deadline, they start rending the frame in half resolution in the horizontal direction only. This way, they always maintain a solid 60Hz which is important for such a dexterity-based game, and only degrade the image in the frames that need it.

Because it maintains the framerate and the full 1080 rows, any slight blur is totally hidden. Even better: because the blur only engages on the frames with *lots* of stuff happening on the screen, it's pretty much guaranteed you will always be distracted by the crazy stuff happening to even notice any quality change.

I really wish more games used this (or similar) tricks - just keeping the framerate consisten (at the expense of quality) really helps - you don't have those stutters that end up just drawing attention to the problem areas.

The kind of argument made by someone who understands the difference between criminal , reckless act likely to lead a nasty manslaughter, and an act that is simply a civil tort, likely to only incur statutory damages?

Of course, this "civil-vs-criminal law" being one of the most common distinctions made in all jurisprudence, I'm sure you already knew this... but i never like to accuse random people of willfully lying to blur a political issue, in the hopes of serving some hypothetical self-interest. So I'll assume this is a freak case of ignorance instead. Links to easily cure yourself of this unfortunate condition have been provided.

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)

As long as windows apps scale badly, there's a strong incentive to *not* produce a high-PPI display; customers would likely blame the monitor for "screwing up windows".

Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.

But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.

And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")

Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...

ext4, which was somewhat light on tools last i checked (have to look into that...)

More to the point, though... halting writes wasn't really possible, due to a lot of unrelated (and probably more important) things thrashing the disk.

It's a beautify example of why a well though-through backup plan is important, unfortunately. RAID doesn't protect against being an idiot with 'rm', and it's probably a good idea to research things like those undelete tools before you need them...

especially when combined with 'find' and 'xargs', in what is supposed to be a simple task.

If you don't, you'll do something like what i just did ("worst typo in a decade"): you see, i was trying to update emacs and wanted to purge all the .elc files from ~/.emacs.d
Unfortunately, through a bad typo, some miss-applied keyboard shortcuts, and rushing through without mounting a scratch monkey... what actually ran was effectively "find ~/.emacs.d | xargs rm".

accidently deleted the 'grep'. Oops. 15+ years of elisp/etc destroyed.

Was it backed up? Nope! Been meaning to check it all into git, but always put it off as a "minor, unimportant" task I'd get to later. Of course, we all think that way up until the disaster hits...

*sigh*

Printer? What printer?

You can't grep dead trees.

It seems that we've come full-circle back to "brown".

I thought we had left that with Q1. D3 may have been way too dark, but at least they used some bright colors now and then. I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.

Actually, the game looks pretty decent; it's just that an all-brown color scheme gets boring after a while.

Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.

You don't need to split the screen to play Contra!

Proper co-op should be one screen.

So I'm running FF3.6.9 and click on the first of the video tests, which they claim they got "no result" for in both FF 3 and 4.

It seems to pass just fine, and matches their example image.

This makes me wonder if anybody even bothered to check the results.

IE and Netscape came bundled with the flash plugin in various versions.

On the other side you'll have Safari (on iOS and OS X) and IE (partially, see above) who will support H.264. This is not exactly a clear-cut battle.

Chrome also supports H.264. Including the partial IE support, it's really only firefox that's left out.

You'll also have recording devices like video cameras, cell phone cameras,

And these all support H.264, often with specialized DSP support. This is also the fastest growing market for the web, and likely to be increasingly important in the near future. Ignore mobile support at your own peril.

But first, before any major moves, Google has to make WebM workable - i.e. fully optimized encoders, decoders, quality, etc.; then start making major moves towards its adoption.

This is not even remotely relevant. It's important to us geeks, but we basically don't count. Managers don't make decisions based on quality or decoder speed. They offer their web pages in what they believe to be the popular, common choice.

This puts WebM, as a newcomer, at the very bottom of the list.

Removing patents would only benefit RedHat? What about smart investors that want to compete in the future against cheap knockoffs from China, that totally ignore patents? This myth that patents are necessary (or even relevant) reeks of a limited, USA-centric point of view.

The problem is that Open Source distributions can't license the patents and remain Open Source.

Of course. Which is why the problem should be side-stepped, by leaving things to the OS. We successfully distribute MP3 support from international /contrib branches in many distributions, and video should be no different. Forcing such software to be included in Firefox or other user-visible software is asking for trouble.

That doesn't change the fact that people are buying cameras that output H.264 now, and non-tech people won't understand why "firefox won't play my video - it must be broken".

The fact is, anyone can install a plugin to play any format they like, and most browser users will

Hilarious!

Nobody installs extra plugins. The only reason flash became popular, was that it was distributed with the browser itself. And even more important, managers will make the same decision they always make: targeting the non-plugin, popular solution, which usually maps to "Microsoft/IE". The fact that mozilla (the org) is actively fighting against allowing such plugins makes this irrelevant in any case.

Note, I'm not arguing against lobbying for Open codecs. That's the ideal solution, of course. But the pragmatist in me says that normal people don't even notice patent issues, and will trend towards the software that "just works" with their fancy new camera. Free Software can adapt to that use-case, or be seen as irrelevant.

It's worth mentioning: this has happened before, and the solution was to adapt. I install linux for family/friends, and things like "how do I play my [commercial] DVD?" come up. Discussions of how it's technically illegal to play such a video file with Free Software just cause them to tune out, often moving back to Windows to avoid the issue. Fortunately, many distributions now work around the problem, fetching some DeCSS equivalent from international souces on first use.