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Comment Re:Planned Obsolescence (Score 1) 296

Scaling to 5K is much more difficult.

 
Why would that be true? It's the standard 16:9 aspect ratio, and it's just as easy to tell the API to render to 5K resolution as it would be to any other, arbitrary resolution. GPUs are great at stretching things to whatever resolution you ask for; raster elements like 2D overlays would get smoothed out/filtered, and vector or polygon elements would be rasterized at the higher resolution without a problem.

Comment Re: Build one (Score 1) 325

Ah, Spore. That's one that I opted not to buy when I heard about the DRM issues. I played on my apartment mate's machine for a bit. It seemed interesting (in the short term, at least), but not worth the hassle.

I've never had any of these sorts of issues with console games.

Some consoles have had their bad apples too. 3DS has a few games with perma-saves where the save slots can't be erased for replay (without external tools). Honestly, I haven't run into much trouble on either side (PC or console), but it's always interesting to hear the stories from people who've hit snags.

Comment Re:Just buy a laptop (Score 2) 207

The "real computer" dig is getting annoying. Chromebooks have been on the market at least four years now. Linux users should understand what they are by now.

What I understand about them is that they're machines that make it difficult to use the way that I'd like, have a tiny amount of local storage, and are fairly crippled without a network connection. The fact is that a non-ChromeOS Linux provides a superset of the functionality available in ChromeOS. Chromebooks are what they are, and that's fine, but they aren't something that I want, and they aren't something that I'm going to take particularly seriously.

Comment Re:Just buy a laptop (Score 1) 207

I think that you're either paranoid or insufficiently watchful of your electronics; in my case, it's not likely to be a problem, practically-speaking. Still, my point was that most shortcomings (including that one) might be ignorable if there's enough pressure to get a low-priced gadget.

Comment Re:Just buy a laptop (Score 1) 207

They do; in "developer mode", they'll show the warning screen about OS verification for 30 seconds at boot (although that can be skipped with ctrl-d). It's certainly a downside, but I think some people would see that as a fair trade-off for a $150 Linux laptop. Personally, I'd just spend a little more money to pick up a "real" computer and skip the ChromeOS nonsense, but if I had an extremely limited budget, I'd likely put up with a skippable warning like that.

Comment Re:Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image? (Score 2) 206

A camera sensor is arranged like this. The sensing elements aren't paired up with 1 red, 1 green, and 1 blue, and the values stored by the elements have a larger range than the values in a JPEG (0-4096, say, instead of 0-255). A RAW image is essentially a direct dump from the image sensor, minimally processed and stored in a known format (CR2 is an example). A rasterized image is rendered from the raw data (includes white balancing and other processing), and then it's encoded into a standard image format (usually JPEG).

Comment Re:It shows how powerful misinformation is (Score 1) 222

What would you have them use for the plural of person?

It depends on how clear you want the meaning of the statement to be. You can always add further clarifying information. "Humans" in the phrase "Humans treat animals really, really badly," could be meant to refer to "All humans" or "Some humans", but I would tend to parse it as a general statement about all humans (because in the usages that I've seen the most, if the speaker meant "some, but not all", they would've said so). Regardless, it's silly to use ambiguous wording, then act surprised when someone chooses the meaning that matches what they wanted to see or the meaning that's easiest to argue against.

Comment Re:Misguided move (Score 1) 40

I have a simple example. Doing a fairly basic dungeon crawl, our party ran into a number of fire elementals that were supposed to be a major source of combat challenge. The DM had to re-plan when the cleric in our group started casting "create water" over their heads. Unusual uses of spells and abilities would need to be individually coded into the game engine, and some will always be missed.

Comment Re: Surprise! (Score 1) 103

Human faces were found with the Instagram hastag "#selfie". The purportedly human-like inputs were from an instagram hashtag "#FacesInThings". Kyle McDonaldâ(TM)s face detection library was used to find faces, including the scale and location of the face in the image. Software used that information to align the detected faces and average the results.

Comment Re:/Oblg. No plans to use Firefox then (Score 1) 199

The UI changes aren't "selling out" in and of themselves, but I don't care for them. I don't really mind how it looks aesthetically, but I like some of the functionality that was removed (page title at the top of the window, back/forward/reload/home all in the same location, status bar statically located at the bottom of the screen, menu at the top left, etc). The other major changes (integration of the social API, Hello, Pocket, and Reader Mode) aren't directly related, but it feels like a flurry of somewhat-controversial changes on Mozilla's part, so I think that a lot of people probably associate them with each other.

Australis relies on add-ons to re-add functionality that was removed. I think that's actually in keeping with the previous philosophy of the browser (lightweight core, extensible with add-ons/extensions). The other things should probably be some of those extensions, rather than integrated into the base browser.

Comment Re:Mixed (Score 1) 350

I'm describing the situation where I'm tailgated the most often. I don't hang out in the passing lane, and I tend to go at or above the speed limit, traffic permitting. You call a distinction without a difference; I call it some unreasonable and enraging bullshit, and not at all uncommon in southern California.

Comment Re:Oh no, events! (Score 1) 156

The hit-detection code would be somewhere in the event-generation system, most likely. Students would have a "whenHit" function or something. An event dispatcher would need loops and conditionals, so I assume that things inside the actual event-generating engine are outside the scope of what's covered in the tutorial.

Comment Re:Mixed (Score 1) 350

Sounds like the complaint was against tailgaters, not against speeders. Tailgating is aggressive and dangerous. It pisses me off when someone is purposefully putting both of our cars' passengers in increased danger because they're too lazy to move to the passing lane to get around me. Even if I'm blocking their way, they don't have the right to endanger me and my passengers.

That being said, I keep up with the prevailing speed of traffic, I watch for cars coming up fast behind me, and I try to leave an option for them to pass me on the left, when I can. There are still unreasonable assholes that want to ride my bumper to pressure me into moving when the leftmost lane is perfectly open and available for passing. They want to drive faster? Fine; there's nothing I can do about it anyhow. They want to tailgate for no reason? I'm not inclined to humor them.

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